That drive is old it has to be set as PIO Mode. It is possible it does not like the newer board and it's advanced BIOS or it has a head or platter that is failing. Do you have a 386 or early 486 you can try it on ?

Horun wrote on 2021-01-03, 16:16:

That drive is old it has to be set as PIO Mode. It is possible it does not like the newer board and it's advanced BIOS or it has a head or platter that is failing. Do you have a 386 or early 486 you can try it on ?

Tnx for the quick answer!
The bios autodetected pio mode 0 so I guess that's ok for this drive.
The 'failing' scenario is something that got to me too, do that's why I posted in the first place 😀
I've got some 286/386/486 stuff, the next thing to try will be a magnificent 286 motherboard with an ISA IDE controller. Otherwise it'll be a 486 DX50 ISA only system.

I wouldn't spend too much time on it. I've had/have a few Conner drive and found out once they start give trouble back up as much as you cam, if you can and throw it in the rubbish. They are picked up and boot off my IBM PC300GL mini tower from 1998, if they are in good condition, no problem at all.

Auto detecting the drive doesn't mean the drive is going to function correctly if it is faulty...

I have an AST 386SX laptop with a Conner drive that is detected properly by the BIOS but doesn't boot. Never did figure out what was wrong with it, I hear it spin and such but it just gives errors if you try and boot into the DOS 5 install it would have had from the factory.

I think I remember from a Macintosh drive that wouldn't read, the grease was just so dried and gummed up it wouldn't spin up. But the data was all there and it read correctly (even disassembled). Of course then the guy blew up the controller chip by using the wrong power supply...but besides the point...

Which is, if it worked before, fundamentally, it is probably in the same condition.

Alrighty, had a little success here!

I connected the Conner CP3044 to my 286 system, based on my and set the bios to standard AT type 42 (c977 h5 s17, no wpcomp).
This makes me lose just 3 cylinders, not a big deal.

I booted from the Miniscribe 8051A that's with this system (PC DOS 5.02) and after Fdisk and format all 41MB are available!

Bonus accomplishment: it's a Conner drive that's happy to run both as slave and master with slave present!

Thanks all for the advice!

And now on to my next challenges: a Seagate 1080MB and Conner 30174E that won't spin up due to bearing problems (they do try, the Seagate won't make it to full speed and there Conner makes the little motor noise and wiggles the plates)

waterbeesje wrote on 2021-01-06, 22:17:

Alrighty, had a little success here! I connected the Conner CP3044 to my 286 system, based on my and set the bios to standard AT […]
Show full quote

Alrighty, had a little success here!
I connected the Conner CP3044 to my 286 system, based on my and set the bios to standard AT type 42 (c977 h5 s17, no wpcomp).
This makes me lose just 3 cylinders, not a big deal.

I booted from the Miniscribe 8051A that's with this system (PC DOS 5.02) and after Fdisk and format all 41MB are available!
Bonus accomplishment: it's a Conner drive that's happy to run both as slave and master with slave present!
Thanks all for the advice!

And now on to my next challenges: a Seagate 1080MB and Conner 30174E that won't spin up due to bearing problems (they do try, the Seagate won't make it to full speed and there Conner makes the little motor noise and wiggles the plates)

Great ! Glad you got it working. Yeah I have a few small old IDE that just do not like any old board that has newer BIOS with Large Disk and DMA support ,
one is a Seagate ST-351A which a 40Mb is very picky and so is the Quantum 105AT 100Mb but not quite as bad as the Seagate.

I had a similar experience with an Nforce2 board and some old < 540 mb drives. I had to set them to “CHS” access mode instead of “Auto” in order to get them to work correctly. When in “Auto”, the drives would detect and spin up but but would give a loud “clank” when I’d access them, as if the drive was trying to access a sector outside the actual drive geometry, and then click like crazy, as if the heads were trying to reallign on sector 0 or something like that. I’m just happy that they didn’t die durring the troubleshooting. Really sounded like they were taking a beating in the process.

waterbeesje wrote on 2021-01-06, 22:17:

Alrighty, had a little success here!

Well done for persisting 😉

Picky computers and peripherals...

The 41MB Miniscribe 8051 in this 286 works on anything that smells like ATA. The same K6-2 board detected it as it should, and instantly boots. I once hooked it up to an AWE32 and Win98 detected it fine. A Promise dual ata100 IDE controller? Just autodetected it and I can read/write it in Windows 10.