Clicking sounds like a power issue, does the adapter have an external power supply?

Yes this is a issue that I have seen with really small drives. It’s not just you. There is something about the way the old drives interface that the new usb adapters aren’t compatible with.

You’ll just have to burn cds to transfer files into those old systems or use usb/network

My experience with two old hard drives that get clicky on new controllers is that the clicky failures go away if I can force CHS addressing. My guess is that the hard drives don’t fully support LBA in the way that the controller would like and the clicks are the poor old drive trying to put the heads in places they cannot go. Not sure how I can verify that guess though.

USB adapters probably trying to use ATAPI commands to set up DMA mode, and most stuff smaller/older than 420MB ish is just going
"Wat?"
Also jumpers were not so standardised or so simple. Multiple jumpers may have to be moved to go from master to single drive. Best to pull jumper settings for each drive, hopefully a mini data sheet which may give clues to drives quirks.

Only external adapter that I've got that works with older drives is a PCMCIA card by Apricorn, which was sold as an upgrade/backup product for laptop hard drives, with new larger drive... and having said that, it's not that smart and fails on newer/bigger ones.

Let's keep it simple

most, if not all, IDE-USB adapters do not support old drives. It's likely because the old drives do not have LBA support.

I recall having a IDE-USB/FW enclosure, which had different behaviour depending on the interface, USB or FW, it was attached to. I should test this with older drives...

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-12-12, 02:57:

Yes this is a issue that I have seen with really small drives. It’s not just you. There is something about the way the old drives interface that the new usb adapters aren’t compatible with.

You’ll just have to burn cds to transfer files into those old systems or use usb/network

I'm trying to take and image of the old drive. I always take a dd image of any retro hard drive I get if it has a functioning original old operating system. The intent is threefold:

- To rescue any original software or driver files
- To be able to revert the image back to when I got the computer, in case I damage something.
- I'm trying to figure out an easy way to binary copy older HDs to an SD/CF card so I can run the period correct OS from stable hardware. I have been able to copy a 120GB original HD, restore it to a NOS 120GB HD, and I'm going to test a smaller HDD to a SDD next.

I know SD/CF are slow compared to modern HDs, but the work great for some older PCs. The 344Mb drive I'm trying to rescue is rated for 6Mb/s which a SD or CF can easily keep up with The other problem I have is that some older BIOSes cannot handle the SD/CF adapters so I usually wind up installing XT-IDE. Easier on a desktop than a laptop, usually. Not many laptops with option rom sockets or ISA slots. 😀

weedeewee wrote on 2022-12-12, 06:18:

Let's keep it simple

most, if not all, IDE-USB adapters do not support old drives. It's likely because the old drives do not have LBA support.

I recall having a IDE-USB/FW enclosure, which had different behaviour depending on the interface, USB or FW, it was attached to. I should test this with older drives...

I wonder if one of the slightly newer (1st gen Pentium) PCs I have can read the disk if I turn off LBA support in the bios. If so... maybe I can run a CF/IDE convertor with a minimal DOS install to boot from, run the old HD on the secondary IDE and copy the contents to a subfolder on the CF card.

This doesn't help with the USB adapter issue, but could you just use an older ISA IDE controller in a Pentium system to run and then image the drive?

Alternatively, I'm not sure what sort of software exists that would run on a Pre-Pentium for imaging drives, but if have the proper imaging software you could copy the image to a CF card using a Compact Flash to Parallel port reader. I use one of these for getting stuff off of systems that cannot use USB and they work great. There are lots of different models out there so I'd recommend doing some research on whatever model you come across. The ones I have will work on my IBM 5150, but it requires that I have the 286 CPU on my TinyTurbo286 upgrade card switched on. Apparently the driver requires some kind of 286 instructions, but otherwise works with an ancient Everex EGA+Parallel card under DOS 3.3.

I'm not sure of the maximum accessible size of the CF card, but I think that would depend on the card reader's limitations and whatever DOS version you're running. I only ever bother with a 32MB card because that's positively huge for a 5150. In your case a 512MB card would probably be plenty.

scruit wrote on 2022-12-12, 12:41:

weedeewee wrote on 2022-12-12, 06:18:

Let's keep it simple

most, if not all, IDE-USB adapters do not support old drives. It's likely because the old drives do not have LBA support.

I recall having a IDE-USB/FW enclosure, which had different behaviour depending on the interface, USB or FW, it was attached to. I should test this with older drives...

I wonder if one of the slightly newer (1st gen Pentium) PCs I have can read the disk if I turn off LBA support in the bios. If so... maybe I can run a CF/IDE convertor with a minimal DOS install to boot from, run the old HD on the secondary IDE and copy the contents to a subfolder on the CF card.

Yes, that should work.

weedeewee wrote on 2022-12-12, 15:52:

scruit wrote on 2022-12-12, 12:41:

weedeewee wrote on 2022-12-12, 06:18:

Let's keep it simple

most, if not all, IDE-USB adapters do not support old drives. It's likely because the old drives do not have LBA support.

I recall having a IDE-USB/FW enclosure, which had different behaviour depending on the interface, USB or FW, it was attached to. I should test this with older drives...

I wonder if one of the slightly newer (1st gen Pentium) PCs I have can read the disk if I turn off LBA support in the bios. If so... maybe I can run a CF/IDE convertor with a minimal DOS install to boot from, run the old HD on the secondary IDE and copy the contents to a subfolder on the CF card.

Yes, that should work.

I don't have any drives old enough to test that close at hand, but if the drive is CHS only, you probably won't need to disable anything in tbe BIOS, AFAICR.

darry wrote on 2022-12-12, 17:29:

weedeewee wrote on 2022-12-12, 15:52:

scruit wrote on 2022-12-12, 12:41:

I wonder if one of the slightly newer (1st gen Pentium) PCs I have can read the disk if I turn off LBA support in the bios. If so... maybe I can run a CF/IDE convertor with a minimal DOS install to boot from, run the old HD on the secondary IDE and copy the contents to a subfolder on the CF card.

Yes, that should work.

I don't have any drives old enough to test that close at hand, but if the drive is CHS only, you probably won't need to disable anything in tbe BIOS, AFAICR.

Agreed.

darry wrote on 2022-12-12, 17:29:

I don't have any drives old enough to test that close at hand, but if the drive is CHS only, you probably won't need to disable anything in tbe BIOS, AFAICR.

Most BIOS from 1994 forward with PATA have drive mode setting options of AUTO, CHS (aka Normal) , LARGE, or LBA.

I have a Quantum LP240A GM240A01X drive that reports via ATA that it supports PIO 3, so it should support LBA-28 in theory but all it does is go clickity-clack unless I specifically chose CHS in the BIOS.

I tried the drive on a Nforce2 chipset mobo with Award BIOS circa 2005 and an i430TX with 2001 BIOS.

Both motherboards work OK with LBA-28 on other drives, so my guess is that this drive just doesn't really do LBA-28 correctly.

Edit: the drive works fine on Pre-1994 motherboards, as you might expect.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/203975531036

There is a usb card for 8 bit ISA slot.

douglar wrote on 2022-12-12, 18:37:

Most BIOS from 1994 forward with PATA have drive mode setting options of AUTO, CHS (aka Normal) , LARGE, or LBA. […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2022-12-12, 17:29:

I don't have any drives old enough to test that close at hand, but if the drive is CHS only, you probably won't need to disable anything in tbe BIOS, AFAICR.

Most BIOS from 1994 forward with PATA have drive mode setting options of AUTO, CHS (aka Normal) , LARGE, or LBA.

I have a Quantum LP240A GM240A01X drive that reports via ATA that it supports PIO 3, so it should support LBA-28 in theory but all it does is go clickity-clack unless I specifically chose CHS in the BIOS.

I tried the drive on a Nforce2 chipset mobo with Award BIOS circa 2005 and an i430TX with 2001 BIOS.

Both motherboards work OK with LBA-28 on other drives, so my guess is that this drive just doesn't really do LBA-28 correctly.

Edit: the drive works fine on Pre-1994 motherboards, as you might expect.

Interesting, then again Nforce and backwards compatibility don't exactly do hand in hand, generally speaking .

EDIT: I misread. I thought you wrote that one old drive did not work on the Nforce board at all.

Connecting the stone age hard drive to the Pentium should work, most likely with autodetect as well. Just make sure you have the correct drive parameters and disable LBA and large settings 😀

And ofc make sure the drive is jumpered right. These old drives may be found at TH99 as well:
http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/ (bottom of the page)

I even had a 20MB stepper drive hooked up to my Pentium 3 450 with BX board once to transfer data from Windows XP to pc Dos 5.01 😀 I think it was a Miniscribe 8425AT. Or some 40MB Miniscribe/Maxtor 8051A

If that still won't do:
Networking
Null modem / laplink (interlink)
CD-ROM
XT-IDE (CF / SD / USB adapter)

I tried standard CHS mode and specifying the parameters directly based upon what is labeled on the top of the drive, and it does not detect correctly. This was in a Gateway G6 running AMIBIOS 1.00.01.DT0T (1997)

I have an older PC I can test this in ("Uncle Sherman") in a couple of weeks, a 386 that should not struggle with it at all.

scruit wrote on 2022-12-18, 13:54:

I tried standard CHS mode and specifying the parameters directly based upon what is labeled on the top of the drive, and it does not detect correctly. This was in a Gateway G6 running AMIBIOS 1.00.01.DT0T (1997)

I have an older PC I can test this in ("Uncle Sherman") in a couple of weeks, a 386 that should not struggle with it at all.

At this point it would be nice to have a list of the make/model of hardrives that you are trying.

Sure. I actually solved one problem... I tried a different laptop hard drive on an older Gateway P2 PC and found that it did not detect either. I knew this was wrong as I used an identical drive as the C: on that computer, so did some more diagnosis and found that pin 31 on my 3.5-2.5 ide adapter was open (Interrupt!). Bad etchign at the factor, looks like the mask for the copper traces flaked off jst before the etched the board. I installed a bodge wire and now the adapter works on my other laptop hard drives... But not the drive I'm trying to rescue data from.

Toshiba T4700CT, boots to Windows 3.11 if I put the HD in there. Trying to rescue the drive image do I can use a 2.5" sd-ide adapter.

The hard drive is an IBM-H2344-A4. 344Mb.

Have tried to use the ide controller built into the Gateway. Just does not detect. An 80Gb Toshiba laptop hard drive detects fine connected in place of the older one.

I have a 486 lying around here, I'll try it in there.

The 486 won't read it either.

Weird thing is that I can get it to detect that the drive is connected and identify the model, but not read the data. I suspect there may be a issue with the cylinder/head/sector counts being off, as I have had similar issues with a Conner CP-3044 that was detected but the CHS had to be manually set. The online numbers didn't work, but trying all the different "Type" numbers in an old 286 eventually found the type that worked and I copied the CHS from there.

I'm going to switch gears for the Toshiba disk and try laplink instead. For Windows 3.1 that should do what I need for now. I'll circle back with the oscilloscope later.

Interestingly, the CP-3044 works in my TI Travelmate LT286-45, but plugging in a CF-IDE or SD-IDE adapter into the the LT286's IDE bus (even with no SD or CF card, and the adapter not powered) causes a black screen no-post. Something is being pulled high or low that should not be. A future project will be to learn IDE standard and figure it out with a logic analyzer. The toshiba drive will get wrapped up into that. I'm past "trying things until it works" - now I want to understand why it's not working at the logic level.

Thanks to all that offered suggestions! Will report back with anything I find.