First post, by kevmif
Hi all
I have a Compaq Deskpro 386 with an SX16 processor and 10mb of RAM.
Twice now the hard drive has become corrupt. The first time I was able to restore most of my files using good old Norton Disk Doctor. The FAT was damaged and there were cross linked files and a few other issues. Second time, not so lucky. ndd won't even start. It says 'program too big to fit in memory'. I made sure himem and emm386 were loading (config.sys got corrupt too) but it still wont work. I think the file is corrupt.
The hard drive is an IBM DALA-3540 (527MB) which isn't a standard drive for this unit as best as I can tell. I have set drive type 42 in the set up program which seems to match.
There don't appear to be any physical issues with the disk based on previous NDD scans and it worked fine for a while with this configuration without any sign of corruption.
The DALLAS DS1287 was dead so I had to run set up each time I powered it on. I got a 'new' one off eBay but it was dead too. I wired up a 3v CR2032 to the DALLAS RTC and it hasn't lost its setting since.
I tried swapping the IDE cable as the factory one is very short and has a nice crease in it from how it is fed up through the chassis to the hard drive.
I tried two different IDE cables but in both cases the drive would not spin up. The only difference is the newer cables were dual cables, not single. Do I need some sort of 'special' IDE cable for this thing.
I think the issue relates either to the cable, or the drive controller.
Can I put a separate ISA I/O card from a 486 in to this thing or will the bios just not acknowledge it?
It was going great until this issue started happening, which interestingly (but probably unrelated) only started when I installed a SB16 card and the associated driver. I even put a network card in and had it accessing the internet via mTCP
I also noticed that directory listings seem to be slow to return to the prompt after listing the files if that means anything.
The only other things I have noticed is some very minor artefacts (a few brief fuzzy lines) when the entire screen changes in some games (had Jazz Jackrabbit and Wolfenstien 3D going on there) and the 1.2MB FDD throws an error on POST unless it is set to 360k (maybe it is a 360k drive but I don't think so - the 1.44MB drive works fine).
I think I will put the hard drive in my P166MMX to see if I can read the previously corrupt files and go from there - but any words of wisdom that might help or shed some light on the problem would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks