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Seagate Medalist ST3630A Misidentified

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First post, by Brickpad

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Hello everyone. So I am having a bit of a problem with an old Seagate ST3630A drive. The parameters printed on the drive are 1223 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors @ 545.5MB. However, this drive's capacity is incorrectly detected. At first I thought the problem was limited to the an BIOS being incapable of seeing anything over 530MB, however, when using FDISK and format, it is detected as 600MB. I connected it to my external USB IDE/SATA adapter on my main PC to check it, and Windows 7 detects it as a 600/630MB drive as well. Testdisk reports a CHS/LBA mistmatch, and detects the drive with 67 cylinders, 255 heads, and 63 sectors. Format reports bad sectors on the drive, but I suspect that it may actually be the drive being formatted well beyond its printed capacity. I am almost thinking there could be a firmware problem with this drive, but I don't know for certain. Any ideas as to what would cause this misidentification?

EDIT

I should mention that the ST3630A model drive is 630MB. The ST3660A drive is a 545MB drive. I am wondering if perhaps there was a factory misprint, where this drive should be labeled as ST3660A, not ST3630A, because the capacity and model number do not match.

Reply 2 of 3, by h-a-l-9000

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ftp://ftp.seagate.com/techsuppt/at/st3630a.txt

-> FORMATTED CAPACITY _______________________631.1

Possible translations:
                       This translation is generally acceptable, as
                       is, for non-DOS operating systems:
       1223 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sectors = 631,185,408

                       DOS operating systems may require a system bios
                       that accepts larger values for the CMOS head
                       parameter which lowers cylinders below 1024:
        611 cyl, 32 heads, 63 sectors = 630,669,312

                       Other FULL-CAPACITY solutions for DOS operating
                       systems include third-party drive preparation
                       software, system BIOS which supports LBA mode
                       or bios driven host adapters. Otherwise,
                       capacity may be limited to:
       1024 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sectors = 528,482,304

1+1=10

Reply 3 of 3, by elianda

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Testdisk reports a CHS/LBA mistmatch, and detects the drive with 67 cylinders, 255 heads, and 63 sectors.

It doesn't seem to support LBA, so the Testdisk report is invalid.
It is probably unwise to use a test utility that requires LBA on a non-LBA capable disk.

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