First post, by RetroSpector78
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I've stumbled upon 2 old identical 286 PCs. Identical except for the hard drives.
One has a Connor CP3000 42MB hard drive and the other a Kalok KL-343 43MB hard drive.
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ … -SL-IDE-AT.html
CHS : 1045 / 2 / 40
CHS (translated) : 980 / 5 / 17
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ … -HH-IDE-AT.html
CHS : 676 / 4 / 31
no translation
The one with the Connor hard drive I was able to setup easily.
The BIOS does not do HD auto detection or user type, there is just a pre-defined list of some 40 CHS configurations.
In the bios there was no 980 / 5 / 17 in the hard drive list, but there was a 977 / 5 / 17 so I figured that was close enough and the hard drive was booting fine.
Now, for the second one with the Kalok drive the closest match I found was 615 / 4 / 26 , but that resulted in only 30MB capacity, and after ms-dos format it reported 2mb of bad sectors and it wasn't able to boot from it (garbled text showed up on boot).
I then tried to confgure the Kalok with 977 / 5 / 17 (same valus as I used with the connor) and that seemed to work fine. Only 6kb of bad sectors and I was able to boot.
So a couple of questions :
- What does that "translated" CHS mean on stason. (Because for the connor I had to match it against the translated CHS values and not 1045 / 2 / 40). Is it a translation between physical CHS and software or BIOS CHS ?
- For the Kalok there are not translated values. Is this something you can do yourself ? How does one know how to configure such a hard drive
- And why does the Kalok work fine with 977 / 5 / 17 but results in a lof of bad sectors and fails to boot with 615 / 4 / 26 ?
Thx