SeaTools/Ontrack/BIOS Hard Drive Issue \ VOGONS

SeaTools/Ontrack/BIOS Hard Drive Issue

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First post, by Sunoo

Posted on 2019-01-29, 17:24

Sunoo Offline

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I recently got a DEC Starion 942, which is mostly working, but came with a dead hard disk. Unfortunately, I didn't have any good IDE drives on hand.

I ordered a IDE-SATA converter with the Marvell chip that seems to be well rated and a 500gb Seagate Firecuda to replace it, knowing that I should be able to use SeaTools to shrink it to a size the Starion could use.

I've now tried 127gb and 8gb limits (assuming I got the LBA numbers right in SeaTools), but neither is working as expected.

For 127gb (and 500gb before using SeaTools), the BIOS saw it as 131mb and Ontrack saw it as 166.2gb but wanted to format it as 131.4mb.

For 8gb, the BIOS saw it as 10mb and Ontrack again saw it as 166.2gb but wanted to format it as 10.70mb.

In both cases, after finishing running Ontrack, rebooting just resulted in "Operating system not found", instead of the Ontrack banner the instructions mention.

I'm sure I must be doing something wrong here, but I haven't the slightest idea what that could be. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Reply 1 of 9, by Rodoko

Posted on 2019-01-30, 02:13

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According to the service manual, that thing allows use for hard drives up to 2 GB in size, that one being the limit for the BIOS

I highly suggest a 4 or 6 gig drive since they have a special jumper config to set them for only two gigs only, same thing happened with the 32 gb limit in later years :3

BTW, I'll link you the service manual for that thing

Attachments

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a0853sva.pdf

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934.13 KiB

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45 downloads

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Starion 942 Service Manual

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Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 2 of 9, by Sunoo

Posted on 2019-01-30, 02:23

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Shouldn’t Ontrack support larger drives? Or am I misunderstanding the point of that tool? Would I be better off picking up a PCI IDE controller?

Reply 3 of 9, by gdjacobs

Posted on 2019-01-30, 03:24

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These are some various sector counts for Seatools to enable simulation of older, smaller drives.

For my 386, I use a sector count of 1032192 (the 0.5GB limit).
For the 2.1 GB limit, your sector count should be 4127760.
For the 8.4 GB limit, your sector count should be 16450560.

For more info, see below:
https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

Ontrack does support larger drives as it bypasses BIOS limitations. I'm not too familiar with it beyond the general concept, though.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 4 of 9, by Sunoo

Posted on 2019-01-30, 04:11

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I tried the 8.4gb limit, the BIOS saw it as 99mb. I tried the 2.1gb limit, the BIOS saw it as 131mb again. And, for the heck of it, I tried the 0.5gb limit, the BIOS saw 0mb. Though in that last case, interestingly Ontrack saw 8.414gb, but failed to do anything with it, complaining about disk geometry, even after I tried the settings it recommended.

If a PCI IDE controller could fix this, I'm likely to just pick one up and see.

Reply 5 of 9, by gdjacobs

Posted on 2019-01-31, 02:14

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Can you manually specify the drive?

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 6 of 9, by Sunoo

Posted on 2019-01-31, 02:16

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I’m not certain what the values should be, by I tried several things that resulted in 100mb or so (131 again I think?).

Reply 7 of 9, by gdjacobs

Posted on 2019-01-31, 03:04

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8.4GB will be 1024 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors. 2.1GB will be 4095 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors. 0.5GB will be 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 8 of 9, by Sunoo

Posted on 2019-02-03, 02:06

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I had no luck with that. I ended up picking up a cheap PCI IDE controller, and now the drive it came with boots and it recognizes the full size of the new drive. I haven't tried formatting or installing an OS on the new drive yet though, since I am currently between CD-ROM drives on this machine.

Reply 9 of 9, by retardware

Posted on 2019-02-03, 03:01

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Amazing.
Back then I wondered who used Ontrack. It was so crappy. Introduced many problems, like you describe.
Maybe you use it because it was included with many things, just like the AOL CDs?

There are quite some alternatives.
SpeedStor, PartitionMagic etc, every one is better than Ontrack.
Or format the disk using a Linux Live CD and then SYS it from the DOS command prompt.

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