Hard drive parameters detected by BIOS but shows "HDD Controller Failure" at boot \ VOGONS

Hard drive parameters detected by BIOS but shows "HDD Controller Failure" at boot

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First post, by mega486

Posted on 2018-10-25, 21:16

mega486 Offline

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Posts: 5
Joined: 2018-10-25, 18:02

I have a Conner CFS540A that can be correctly detected by my 386/486 hybrid motherboard, but during post it always give me a "HDD controller failure" message. If I pressed F1 and continue boot into dos with the floppy, fdisk hang on creating primary partition. I can hear the hard drive giving out pretty loud mechanical noise, like the disk head is hitting something.

I've checked/switched the cable, switched motherboard, double checked jumper settings on the I/O card and the hard drive, all the same, pretty much ran out of idea now. Does this looks like a bad hard disk?

Reply 1 of 2, by mega486

Posted on 2018-10-28, 07:16

mega486 Offline

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Rank: Newbie
Posts: 5
Joined: 2018-10-25, 18:02

Just an update. Ordered another drive and turns out the previous drive is indeed defective. Unfortunately the new drive has weird problem too. The drive will give out random content for certain sectors but won't report them bad. Never seen something like this when I was using them back in the old days. I guess old age does have strange effects on everything. 😢 😢 😢 😢

Reply 2 of 2, by chinny22

Posted on 2018-11-01, 14:57

chinny22 Offline

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Joined: 2011-08-26, 12:02
Location: Australian but living in the UK for now

I've had that on my 486 at times.
Sometimes its just safer to enter the parameters in manually rather then rely on auto detect.

Never seen the other issue though!

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