My guess is that a larger capacity HDD is a WD brand and you are connecting it to the same IDE channel as a lower capacity HDD?

Small one is a WD, large is a Fujitsu. Why would the brand and channels matter? Also, when I had just the large as the only drive as the primary master, it didn't detect it properly either - it showed as like 1GB in the BIOS but DOS/Windows installer only saw it as 200MB or so.

AppleDash wrote:

Why would the brand and channels matter?

Your WD HDD is from the time when IDE HDDs were limited to 528MB and used slow PIO transfer mode generally, while newer Fujitsu uses UDMA, if you will connect both HDDs on the same cable, Fujitsu will have to accommodate to the slower transfer mode. This is why connecting optical drive and HDD on the same cable is not recommended. That alone might cause issues with some systems + jumper settings for master/slave must be accurate on both HDDs then.

Fujitsus are the worst HDDs from that time, known for high failure rates and poor performance, I'm not surprised that you can't make it work properly. HDD has to be configured so that it could be detected automatically, setting geometry manually will give no results if drive is not recognized correctly in the first place.

Connect just Fujitsu on pri IDE channel and try all jumper settings just so that it could be correctly detected at least, also, use IDE cable that you are 100% sure that is good.

If it still cannot be detected correctly, check if other PCs can detect it, if same thing happens, you got yourself a typical Fujishitsu 🤣

Had 3 Fujitsu HDDs one 2.1GB and two 3.5GB ones, all three failed mechanically.

The drive is never correctly detected on the socket 7 system - it is always detected wrong, and auto-detect on POST sees the drive but Windows hangs with the drive present. I've tried all jumper settings, and as it is now they are properly configured. The PIO thing is interesting - I didn't consider that. I'd love to just use the Fujitsu as the only drive, but as I said it wasn't working properly earlier and now I don't want to re-install Windows. I'm fine with slow speeds if I can make it work at the right size. The drive is perfectly fine - auto-detects as the right size on a Pentium 4 machine, and I have run a surface scan (as I do with all my drives) and there are no bad sectors and the performance is reasonable. It's not the drive. I'm going to try with a 40GB Maxtor drive as the primary slave and see if that works or not.

AppleDash wrote:

The drive is never correctly detected on the socket 7 system - it is always detected wrong

Compare its geometry given on HDD case (CHS) with geometry that is being detected in BIOS, if numbers do match, then it's detected correctly at this point.

AppleDash wrote:

auto-detect on POST sees the drive but Windows hangs with the drive present

Which tool did you use to create file system (partition) and which Win version did you install on that ancient WD drive?

AppleDash wrote:

I'm going to try with a 40GB Maxtor drive as the primary slave and see if that works or not.

No chance, you need to mod/update BIOS for that mobo to support larger than 8GB drives.

SSTV2 wrote:

Compare its geometry given on HDD case (CHS) with geometry that is being detected in BIOS, if numbers do match, then it's detect […]
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AppleDash wrote:

The drive is never correctly detected on the socket 7 system - it is always detected wrong

Compare its geometry given on HDD case (CHS) with geometry that is being detected in BIOS, if numbers do match, then it's detected correctly at this point.

AppleDash wrote:

auto-detect on POST sees the drive but Windows hangs with the drive present

Which tool did you use to create file system (partition) and which Win version did you install on that ancient WD drive?

AppleDash wrote:

I'm going to try with a 40GB Maxtor drive as the primary slave and see if that works or not.

No chance, you need to mod/update BIOS for that mobo to support larger than 8GB drives.

The CHS on the case is 6704,15,63, whereas the BIOS detects it as size 1127MB and CHS 785,128,63 in LBA mode, size 1129MB and CHS 6704,15,63 in NORMAL mode (right CHS but wrong size, this is the mode where it was seen in the OS as about 200MB), or size 1129MB and CHS 3352,30,63 in LARGE mode.

I used the Windows 95 installer to create a filesystem on the WD drive, and installed Windows 95.

Haven't tried the Maxtor drive just yet, but a few days ago I tried a DTC1181 ISA card to try and fix the problem, and with the card present the system doesn't even post. Said card works fine in 386/486.

Socket 7 motherboards shouldn't have any problems with bigger than 528MB HDDs (it's 386/very early 486 era issue).

I can expect a few of the older S7 boards having problems with 8GB limit, and most having problems with 32GB limit but not with a 3GB drive. I think the HDD in question is faulty.

The HDD is not faulty. This happens with many drives, and this particular drive works 100% fine on a newer system. In addition, the BIOS calculates the wrong size for the drive if I manually enter in the right CHS values. I can do this without the drive even being *connected*, so this wrong calculation has nothing to do with the drive.

SSTV2 wrote:

Which tool did you use to create file system (partition) and which Win version did you install on that ancient WD drive?

Sorry for repeating, i had Fujitsu HDD in mind, and the reason why i asked about OS version is that early Windows95 releases 4.00.950/4.00.950a doesn't support FAT32 file system and UDMA transfers, which Fujitsu should be using.

AppleDash wrote:

The CHS on the case is 6704,15,63, whereas the BIOS detects it as size 1127MB and CHS 785,128,63 in LBA mode, size 1129MB and CHS 6704,15,63 in NORMAL mode (right CHS but wrong size, this is the mode where it was seen in the OS as about 200MB), or size 1129MB and CHS 3352,30,63 in LARGE mode.

Complete weirdness, geometry conversion is done sort of right in LBA and LARGE modes, but size is misreported, NORMAL mode is for 528mb and smaller capacity HDDs, you should stay with default LBA mode.

If you indeed are using early release of Win95, try to create a FAT16 FS on Fuji just to see how OS will react.

I'm using OSR 2.5. I haven't done anything to the Fujitsu drive - I'll try sticking it in the system it works on and giving it a new FAT32 filesystem and seeing if that helps.

You might be able to identify the board if you run AIDA16 from a DOS boot floppy. Myself, I haven't used it in years, but it's a good tool from what I remember.