Did you try reseting the CMOS on the motherboard? Also, try putting the controller in different slots. That may get it to work. The 386 boards are a pain to get hard drive controllers working in them (I had a DX 25mhz and I spent many a day trying to get it to work, and finally did). It is a good idea to avoid any new(er) hard drives. The 120mb should be fine. And, make sure you have the IDE cable plugged in with pin 1 lining up with pin 1 on the board. And, try a regular IDE cable and not a ATA133 cable.

Try to check the components (I/O mostly, disk & cables) on another system to make sure they do work. I know, you can't just put that I/O card in your i7, but in case you do have another suitable system it'd help. At least for the HDD & cables it should be easy.

Depending where you live you may be able to pick up a P4 for free, and a lot of these had IDE which would make a good test PC for a lot of components.
Otherwise something like this will allow you to test the hard drives in any PC
http://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGIFLEX-SATA-Adapter … d/dp/B004JO1Z52

Low level formatting??? Never, never try that on a modernish ide hdd. That was primarily meant for mfm, rll stuff. Hopefully you did no damage to either drives...

hey guys,
thanks for all the replies, i actually went ahead and purchased a new 200mb HD and it works 😀
installed msdos last night and now on to the fun part!
appreciate the help.

monkeyb wrote:

With the new contorller and the old hard drive, the error remains, however with the new hard drive (after setting the heads, cyl […]
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With the new contorller and the old hard drive, the error remains, however with the new hard drive (after setting the heads, cyls, etc.) it says "C: drive failure" instead of "HDD Controller failure".

Still, the final result remains the same, which is that neither drive works. Even trying low level formatting them from the bios results in a HDD error.

Any ideas what I can try? At this point I have 2 sets of parts for the entire hardware chain (Controllers, IDE Cables, Drives), and still can't figure this out.

Should I try to buy yet another older HDD? I'm at a loss for where to take things next, and any suggestions would be appreciated.

Step 1, I know it's been forever, but:
- NEVER LOW LEVEL FORMAT. This never, ever has to be done on IDE equipment, despite the option being in the BIOS.

Step 2, Maximum drive size. Find Ontrack Disk Manager, that is the only way you're going to get a drive larger than 500MB to work.
And once you get that working, don't fiddle with the BIOS hard drive settings or you're going to cry when it wrecks the drive. The BIOS selection should be set to the first option in most cases (usually a 10 or 20MB hard drive.)

In the context of "IDE" drives, the drive controller is actually on the physical hard drive, all the ISA card is, is an ISA bridge. If you don't set the jumpers correctly (If there is only ONE hard drive, it must be jumpered as master, if there is a slave present, it must be jumpered to indicate a slave is present, etc) it will report a drive failure. Some cables don't have keyed connectors or keyed pins, so people might install the cable upside down on the controller-end even if it's keyed properly on the drive.

Personally, I'd suggest getting a "Compact Flash CF to 40 Pin IDE" converter, and a CF card which might cost around 30$ than trying to find a mechanical drive.

Pre-IDE hardware (MFM/RLL drives) use 34 pin cables that are identical to floppy cables except they are NOT TWISTED. Floppy cables, the "A: drive" is the one at the end of the twist and the "B: drive" is the untwisted one. In a pinch for those drives you can use a floppy cable, but really... don't, it will save you a headache.