First post, by badmojo
- Rank
- l33t
This is probably one of those questions for which there is no single answer, but that won’t stop me from asking it.
I have a 500MB IDE HDD in a 486 (Am586 133), VLB system running DOS 6.22. The IO card is the ubiquitous VLB Winbond, with the HDD on IDE 1 and a CD-ROM on IDE 2. The HDD is detected fine by the BIOS, and is running in LBA mode. No disk compression or anything fancy, though I do use smartdrv.
When I run scandisk (which I’ve done every couple of days for the last week), it will come back with something at least half of the time. “The backup of your file system is corrupt”, “File XXX is corrupt”, etc. A surface scan never finds any bad sectors and otherwise the disk seems to work fine – initially I thought scandisk might just be returning false-positives but recently it decided that win.com was busted, and sure enough I can no longer load windows (3.11).
What would be the most likely cause of this? Bad disk? Bad controller? Wrong VLB wait states set? Some setting in the BIOS? I should mention that I’ve also used this same disk with a PCI 486 motherboard, and I was getting the same sorts of problems.
Thanks for any help.
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