First post, by CkRtech
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hey guys - Picked up a 386 system a couple of years ago. RAM issue. Finally toook care of that and got it up and running today.
I am having some issues with the hard drive (HD controller failure message from the 1991 386 BIOS, etc) - a Western Digital Caviar 2120. The no-battery mobo still has the cyl/heads/sec info stored properly. BIOS retains settings so long as you don't power down. But alas - that is the error I get.
I tried swapping the IDE cable and checking the jumpers. Looks good. I pulled it and hooked it up to an external IDE-> USB adapter that I usually use to just fire up an old drive, drag/drop files to.
Doesn't show up with a drive letter in Windows 10, so... I hit up Disk Manager to check partitions. Disk manager does see it and wants to initialize it.
So here is where I have stopped. It would be nice to see if there is any data on there, but I am not sure where to go from here.
1: Any alternative method to use to try to see the drive (hook it up to a spare P90 mobo I have sitting around & see if autodetect can see it)
2: I wonder if a time-appropriate partition manager was installed on it, however...
3: How generic is the HD controller failure message on a 386 from 1991? It has been so long since I have been in a BIOS this old (I think it was my 286 and the year was actually 1991. Don't even remember it, and thankfully my 40 MB HD never had problems. 😁) Seems like the 386 should still see it, though. Hmm.
