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Amstrad PC7386SX Hard Drive issues

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First post, by Nipedley

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Hi guys

I'm trying to revive an Amstrad PC7386SX motherboard but can't get it to work with any hard drive. I've tried multiple IDE cables of various vintages, and drives ranging from a 640MB Quantum Bigfoot to 8GB Maxtor's and CompactFlash adapters which is what I'm really intending to use here. There's no 'Auto' in the BIOS so I have to set cylinders/heads etc. manually

All I get on boot is 'Fixed Disk Controller Failure', usually accompanied with a brief flash of the activity light from whatever drive I have connected.

I'm thinking the easiest way to get around this is fit an ISA controller, as I have a spare 16-bit ISA slot. Would getting something like the XT-IDE compactflash card be a good idea, or just any period 16-bit ISA IDE controller?

If you have any other suggestions for things I can try to get the onboard controller working I'm all ears !

Reply 1 of 2, by Dioxaz

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Crap, I'm seeing this only now. Sorry for the bumping but what I'm posting here could serve as a reference for other Mega PC or 7386SX owners. I've managed to fit a 20GB hard drive in my Mega PC (which is identical to a PC7386SX, but with the additional Mega Drive ISA card) by selecting a "User" type and entering the following settings: 2048 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors (landing zone can be set to 0). The drive is then recognized as a 500MB one and is perfectly usable and bootable. I'll edit that post later to add the exact model of hard drive I'm using.

Unfortunately, this won't work with all drives. Of all "recent" drives I own, only that one could work. All other drives were also giving me that infamous "Fixed Disk Controller Failure" message with the same exact settings.

My Amstrad Mega PC personal archive.

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