Have you checked any of these for clues?

http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/v/U-Z/50101.htm

http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/v/U-Z/50102.htm

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2009/reading … oc/PARADISE.TXT (right at the end of the file)

Thanks much, I'll be getting the PC Saturday and will try these suggestions then.

The 5170 was delivered today, and I shoved that VGA card in it and hooked it up to a monitor and it came right up. So I didn't have to fool with the dip switches. Unfortunately the old MFM drive died during shipping, (I imagine the guy didn't park the heads before he sent it, that's a thing with MFM right?

So now I need a new HD. My plan is to go SCSI, I have 2 8GB IBM drives from servers at my old workplace and a SCSI card on the way, but the thing I'm curious about and hoping someone has some experience with is what is the recommended method for mounting half height drives in a 5170 case if both the half height bays are filled with floppy drives? I'm going to remove the old HD when I get ready to put in the new ones and was hoping someone knew of a tray or adapter or anything that could utilize the space where the full height old MFM drive was removed from. Any suggestions are welcome.

Small update, I went through and pulled apart the AT then assembled it again this time changing the connector on the HD ribbon cable and guess what the old MFM HD fired right up so now I'm the proud owner of a full big 20MBs of super fast storage! Also I found that below the floppy drives there is a third bay which appears to be intended for a hidden hard drive which is great, but I still need some kind of cage and rails or something. Anyone have a line on where I might find that? Im going to try standard 3.5 to 5.25 rails and see if that will work in it but I don't know for sure what that slot is made for at the bottom.

Otherwise loving the AT! What is some good system profiling software to check which chips are installed and clocked at what, what was the name of that one program that everyone uses in DOS to compare performance in old dos machines?

Shagittarius wrote:

Otherwise loving the AT! What is some good system profiling software to check which chips are installed and
clocked at what, what was the name of that one program that everyone uses in DOS to compare performance in old dos machines?

I'm using various programs. CheckIt!, NSSI, SI (System Information; CentralPoint/Symantac), Speedsys, Syschk, WCPU, InfoSpotter,
JC-Bench, MIPS Benchmark (checks register/memory speed), cpuid.com/cpumhz.com, PC-Status 85, Dr. Hardware, Axel Folley's PC-Benchmark..

Edit: Congrats to your new 5170! :)

So I've got a 9.1 GB SCSI drive installed, low level formatted and ready to partition. But I'm unable to get the partitioning to stick.

SCSI Select says the following message about the drive upon boot:

SCSI ID #0 - IBM-PSG ST39175LW !# - Drive D: (81h)

This is a little unusual to me but googling turns up nothing on what the !# means if anything...I'm using an Adaptec 1540CF so maybe its just something that card does?

Anyways on with the problem, when I go in to FDISK it present me with the message:

"Unable to access Drive 2"

Which is of course my SCSI drive. I can then see the disk, change to it, partition it and everything looks happy but the moment I reboot the partition information is gone again. It's almost like it thinks the drive is write protected, which of course it is not, no jumpers on the drive.

I should also mention that this use to be a server HDD, is it possible they were configured in a way that even a low level format might not undue the format it was in for the server? Can anyone recommend any helpful tools beyond fdisk?

A little more info Im running this as a 68pin drive on a 50pin SCSI cable with a high bit terminator adapter attached to the drive, it is the only device in the chain and is terminated at the other end via the controller.

So I will of course not stop messing with this till I figure out the issue but I would be really grateful for any ideas anyone has.

Thanks!

Hmmm... It might be that Grub is still on the MBR. I have a machine that only has 2 1.2MB floppies, no CDROM, no USB. What method can I use for removing grub from the MBR if that is indeed my problem?

fdisk /mbr says "The master boot code has NOT been updated.

Well I moved the drive to my P90 that has DOS7 on it and I was able to use that version of fdisk to partition and format the drive, but moving it back to the 5170 I again end up with it seeing no partitions and an inability for fdisk to do anything to the volume.

Giving up for the night, perhaps for the weekend, I've got a couple more hard drives incoming, I guess that will be my next step unless another suggestion comes up.

I now believe that there was some kind of Drive overlay on this HDD that is screwing up FDISK but I dont know what it is or how to get rid of it. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Doesn't the Adaptec 1540CF have a 8Gb size limit?

Would that possibly cause this? Is there a better ISA SCSI adapter which would support these 9.1GB or larger drives? I think that limitation is 8GB formatted and 9.6 GB unformatted...

yawetaG wrote:

Doesn't the Adaptec 1540CF have a 8Gb size limit?

it has, it's a limit of 8GB per HDD, and your disks are 9.1 GB according with the internet, so that card doesn't work with those disks
another scsi adapter, don't know because for the time the 8gb barrier was "broken" there were VLB and PCI adapters, or Microchannel.

Maybe it is a way to get it working, mainly via a drive overlay, but don't know if these support scsi, or if they need to.

Thanks, that's a total bummer, it's weird that the card can see the capacity and format it, then fdisk can see the capacity it just can't do anything with it. I guess I'll just have to keep these as back up drives for my newer machines and get something smaller. Thanks for the help.

I heard that I could use partition magic 4.0 to maybe get this to work, so I might go that route to see if its possible, but that needs a 386 to run on so I'll have to do the work on my P90 and then transfer the drive back which is going to have to wait for another weekend as I've wasted a lot of hours pursuing this already. Silly me.

Well crap, I got a 4GB drive and I'm getting the same message : "Unable to access drive 2."

So the new drive is a SEAGATE: ST34501N CHEETAH 4LP 4550MB 3.5"/SL SCSI3 ULTRA.

Is it possible that I have something set up wrong with the termination on the SCSI chain that it can see the drive, I can low level format and verify it, but when I go to partition it with fdisk it cant do that?

I've set up SCSI before and never had this much problem but I've never used this particular AHA 1542CF before. I'm really at a loss at this point still.

Hmmm...I'm starting to wonder if this is somehow a conflict with my AST Rampage AT RAM card. I'm going to do a little testing tomorrow without that board and see if I get a better result.

Read something about a problem with AST boards here: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?390 … -IBM-5170/page2

Thats about a different board and its not described as the same problem but its close and worth a shot.

Update:

I just swapped out the BIOS for AMI bios and now I can write partitions to the drives. Seems like it was simply a BIOS issue all along, so this saga is complete. Thanks to everyone who helped me along the way!

I'm happy you solved it, i didn't help much because never had any scsi hardware