I have just got Victoria running in XP and the drive seems to be detected in PIO mode when doing a PCI Scan, however when I try to get the drive passport I get a "Waiting of readiness... Drive not ready!"

Edit: Upon closer look inspection I think it just found the IDE controller, not the drive itself.

AirIntake wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:00:

Here you go

the cdrom you see is the one you booted HDAT2 from ...

Horun wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:05:

I believe Testdisk wrote a DDO to the drive

it has no drive overlay functionality

AirIntake wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:18:

I have just got Victoria running in XP and the drive seems to be detected in PIO mode when doing a PCI Scan, however when I try to get the drive passport I get a "Waiting of readiness... Drive not ready!"

Edit: Upon closer look inspection I think it just found the IDE controller, not the drive itself.

screenshots
also try usb enclosure if you have one

Incorrect way to do.

Use bootable 98se boot disk floppy which is downloadable, to delete old partitions then create them using fdisk then format that. Then boot again and start up you 98se install optical disk by typing install or setup.

Use second hard drive to transfer stuff between PCs not the OS boot hard drive or a CF card and IDE to CF adapter. Second, doing on a windows 10 is very dangerous as win 10 *will* delete incompatible files, I used to have lot of stuff and they disappeared on my backed up data on second and third hard drive hooked to a modern PC running windows 10 which dates back to DOS era. Do it on a XP computer as a bridge with windows 10 to transfer the file to the XP and keep them on XP.

Cheers,

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-02-05, 00:00:

Horun wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:05:

I believe Testdisk wrote a DDO to the drive

it has no drive overlay functionality

In Picture: #3 is the CDROM. #4 is the HD now seen as some other cdrom from my perspective.
How do you know Testdisk did not write a DDO to the HD ? what did it write too for the drive to change sector size ? Can't be the HD bios that takes some special flash tools designed for each HD make and model.
It sure as shit Effed up by telling him to change the drive to 2048 byte sector which are never used on PC HD . Go tell the Testdisk people they have an issue and is currently well documented here 😁

I agree with Pentiumspeed !

Do not confuse physical sectors with logical sectors.
The physical sectors are determined by the hard disk firmware, almost certainly in this case the physical sectors are 512 bytes, until the Advanced Format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format) standard was created that established the physical sectors at 4kb, 512 byte sectors were used.
The logical sectors are the sector size that the file system establishes, fat/ntfs/ext, etc... for the OS to access the files, that is, the file system does a conversion between logical and physical sectors.
What Testdisk asked would surely be what size of the logical sector to use to read the data from the hard disk, I don't think it could change the size of the physical sectors in the firmware of the hard disk, and I don't think it could damage the firmware of the hard disk .
If the BIOS of a computer that supports at least 28-bit LBA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing) does not recognize the full capacity of the hard drive, it is likely that the hard drive has failed.
Another program you can try is MHDD https://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
MHDD supports detection of hard drives even if they are not configured by the bios or have been hot plugged. If MHDD does not recognize the hard disk either, it is very likely that it has failed.
I forgot to mention that the bios also performs a sector conversion between the hard drive and the file system, that's what LBA is for.
Everything explained above may contain a lot of omisions but I think it clarifies a bit how the issue of sectors works.
The fact that the HDAT2 didn't recognize the hard drive correctly isn't very encouraging, but it's important to be sure that the motherboard being used would support the full-size hard drive with no problem.

Horun wrote on 2022-02-05, 01:30:

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-02-05, 00:00:

Horun wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:05:

I believe Testdisk wrote a DDO to the drive

it has no drive overlay functionality

In Picture: #3 is the CDROM. #4 is the HD now seen as some other cdrom from my perspective.

"PCI DEVICE", google suggests thats how WD drives with corrupted firmware show up in HDAT2

Horun wrote on 2022-02-05, 01:30:

How do you know Testdisk did not write a DDO to the HD ?

because Testdisk :
- doesnt contain any drive overlay bootloader capabilities
- drive overlay bootloader as the name suggests only works after motherboard bios actually BOOTs from a drive with DDO installed into boot disk's master boot record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_drive_overlay
- hypothetical DDO (which Testdisk definitely didnt create on your drive) is irrelevant to the process of BIOS IDE Autodetection which queries drive itself submitting IDENTIFY_DEVICE ATA command

Horun wrote on 2022-02-05, 01:30:

It sure as shit Effed up by telling him to change the drive to 2048 byte sector which are never used on PC HD

in your first message you said drive started going crazy BEFORE using testdisk

Horun wrote on 2022-02-05, 01:30:

. Go tell the Testdisk people they have an issue and is currently well documented here 😁

so far only well documented issue here is :
>I took the hard drive out of my P3 500 yesterday to image it in a newer PC and was greeted with an empty unbootable drive of the wrong capacity.

drive started dying, whatever you did afterwards was irrelevant to its health

Horun wrote on 2022-02-05, 01:30:

I agree with Pentiumspeed !

I dont even fully understand Pentiumspeed post 😮 other than describing things you could do if the drive was actually being detected by the BIOS.

Hoping wrote on 2022-02-05, 13:23:

everything

exactly!

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-02-05, 00:00:

the cdrom you see is the one you booted HDAT2 from ... […]
Show full quote

AirIntake wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:00:

Here you go

the cdrom you see is the one you booted HDAT2 from ...

Horun wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:05:

I believe Testdisk wrote a DDO to the drive

it has no drive overlay functionality

AirIntake wrote on 2022-02-04, 23:18:

I have just got Victoria running in XP and the drive seems to be detected in PIO mode when doing a PCI Scan, however when I try to get the drive passport I get a "Waiting of readiness... Drive not ready!"

Edit: Upon closer look inspection I think it just found the IDE controller, not the drive itself.

screenshots
also try usb enclosure if you have one

As requested here's a Victoria screenshot showing the PCI scan. The API scan only shows my 20GB Windows XP boot drive & volume so I didn't take a shot of that.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-02-05, 15:03:

so far only well documented issue here is :
>I took the hard drive out of my P3 500 yesterday to image it in a newer PC and was greeted with an empty unbootable drive of the wrong capacity.

drive started dying, whatever you did afterwards was irrelevant to its health

Perhaps the drive has indeed died now but the unbootable nature and wrong capacity was caused by a FAT32 formatting difference between my P3 500 and my newer imaging PC. I've been able to recreate it multiple times on another drive.
Using a known good 80GB drive I FDISK and reformatted it on my P3 500. The FDISK went fine and showed correct capacity but I noticed that when I went to format it listed the capacity as "10,78M" which is quite a strange number. When format finished though it did show the correct size. I then copied over the Windows 98 install files, shut down, and put the drive in my imaging PC where after boot it showed it was a 60GB drive with no files.
I then forced a FAT32 format on my Windows 10 imaging PC and put it back in my P3 500. Windows 98 setup refused to run on the Windows 10 FAT32 so I ran Scandisk where it gave me the error "Sector size not supported". I was able to then FDISK the drive again on the P3 500, format it again "10,78M" and install Windows 98 without issue.

BUSY instead of DRSC DRDY means drive is completely dead (if its connected to correct interface selected in victoria)
have you tried different IDE cable? checked drive jumpers?

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-02-05, 16:50:

BUSY instead of DRSC DRDY means drive is completely dead (if its connected to correct interface selected in victoria)
have you tried different IDE cable? checked drive jumpers?

You're right, she's definitely dead now, I noticed the hard drive is no longer spinning up at all. The FAT32 formatting issue was a fun red herring though!

Thank you all very much for this help with troubleshooting. I've had a great time!

Anybody interested in discussing the FAT32 format discrepancy? Should I make another topic for it? I'd still like to reinstall Windows 98 on my P3 500 and make a proper image of it.