Tomek TRV wrote on 2024-03-09, 10:21:
I have Wugo PCII which everybody can build because his motherboard is on GitHub. After turning on this computer I can hear one short beep which is normal but next is one long and one short beep. What is the meaning of these beep codes?
What BIOS are you using? The interpretation of beep codes may differ between different BIOS vendors.
Tomek TRV wrote on 2024-03-09, 10:21:
My computer seems to work fine because I can start DOS from floppy but HDD is not working. It is some Seagate MFM 20 MB drive. When computer is booting it shows a message that one HDD is recognized. I used SpeedStor 6.0.3 and it shows that on this drive is no partitions - partition sector corrupt. Disk was in this computer from the beginning, also with controller card.
Do you mean that the disk did work at some time with this computer and this specific controller card? If so, it might be that the partition data got corrupted by some crashed program. If you changed the disk controller, it might be that the disk controller is unable to read the data written by a different kind of disk controller. In any way, if you don't need to access any old data on the drive, just re-format it (low level format, then FDISK, then DOS format). This procedure is described in Chapter 4 of the LCS-6200 series hard drive controller manual (see below), but you need to make sure the jumpers are correctly set for the hard drive type you want to use (see below, again).
Tomek TRV wrote on 2024-03-09, 10:21:
How to "inform" computer/controller about drive geometry?
See the manual of your controller card: https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Long … rs%20Manual.pdf
Appendix 1 one contains the jumper settings for different drive types. The specifications for your ST-225 drive are found at https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Seag … 20-%20Oct85.pdf . That manual allows any step pulse period between 5µs and 200µs, so you can choose Type 5 over Type 6. This is also confirmed by Table 2 in that appendix, explicitly listing the ST-225 as requiring "Type 5".
Tomek TRV wrote on 2024-03-09, 10:21:
How to made these two other drives to work with my controller card (LCS-6210D)? Of course I know that cables must be in correct positions and I checked this few times. Maybe I could try different program to check the drive?
You need to find the drive specifications for the other drives, set the jumpers accordingly, and then run the initialization procedure describe in chapter 4. The step they call "pre-formatting" is what is commonly called "low-level formatting" nowadays. You can only install two drives at a time, and your options for the type of the second drive are limited, as shown in the lower half of Table 1 in that appendix. The ST-225 can be used as second drive in any case, because types 3 to 6 can be selected for the secondary drive independent of the setting for the primary drive.
The "split mode" setting provides a virtual second drive by splitting a single drive into two parts. This mode is meant for drives that are bigger than your operating system can handle. It is usually not required for drives of 30MB or less. With MS-DOS before 3.31, you are limited to partition sizes of 32MB, but you can put multiple partitions on a drive, so you can split the drive on the OS layer which is more flexible and will provide better performance (in most cases) than the splitting performed by the hard drive controller, so the split mode is a feature you likely don't need. The "split mode" in the controller makes the controller expose the single drive as two virtual drives to the BIOS or any other software that directly accesses the hard disk controller, so you can no longer attach two drives to the controller.