Translation mode for hard drive.. which to use?!

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His Royal Majesty King V
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Translation mode for hard drive.. which to use?!

Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

All,

Put this in General because, while it's hardware, it's not Socket 7 hardware.

Anyway, I recently came into a Compaq Presario 1.8GHz P4 system. Previous owner gave it to me because he had hard drive problems and got a new system anyway.

It's an 80GB hard drive. However, the Win98 version of fdisk only appears to recognize it as being around 10 to 11 or so GB, depending on how I set the Translation Mode.

In the BIOS, it shows up as an 80GB hard drive. It also gives me a few options for Translation Mode:

1) None
2) Bit Shift
3) LBA Assist
4) User (where you have to enter your own cylinders, heads, etc values)

So, which of these should I use? I haven't tried the 4th one, and of the first three options, one of them results in fdisk thinking it's around 11 or so GB, and the other two in thinking its 10.8GB. Oddly, when fdisk is trying to verify the drive integrity before setting up a partition, the 11GB setting goes a lot faster than the modes that set to 10.8GB


I'm figuring I've got one of two problems: bad drive, or bad motherboard. I'm going to try fdisking this drive on a known working system, one of my good old Socket 7 units, and see if the drive comes up appropriately.

But as for the translation mode thing, if I *didn't* have any problems, which should I use? I think the default is "Bit Shift"
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Post by Nohr »

I would think that LBA Assist is the correct option.

Perhaps try booting off a Windows XP CD if you have one and use it's utilities to partition & format.

If that didn't work I'd try slaving the drive in another computer to see what's up with it, like you mentioned.

For reference what's the model number of the Presario and the brand & model of the drive?
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Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

It's a Compaq 5430US

In the BIOS, the hard drive is listed as:

Maxtor 4D080H4

I haven't really gotten a look at the label on the drive inside the computer, because there's just so much freakin' dust in the thing.

Before I do a whole lot with it, this machine's got a date with a vacuum cleaner.

Thus far, I don't have XP.
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Post by Nohr »

Apparently the Compaq's bios should have hard drive tester, detailed here.

The drive is a DiamondMax D540X-4D, Maxtor has their own diagnostic utility here.
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Post by punkrawker82 »

ya, Win98's DOS utilities like fdisk and scandisk have trouble with large drives(I think over 32Gb) so always use the companies utilities to partition/format if you're using Win98 :)
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Post by georgep1 »

Don't have the link, but there is an updated version of fdisk for Win98 at microsoft.com for HDs over 64 GB.
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Bingo....

Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

punkrawker and georgep,

You got it. Fdisk was spazzing about the whole thing. Applied the fdisk patch, and voila! It recognizes the drive correctly.

BUT.... is there any way to get fdisk to skip that whole "verifying drive integrity" thing which it insists on doing TWICE if you set the primary partition to other than the whole drive, and EVERY time you assign a new logical drive in the extended partition?!

This drive's a 5400RPM unit, and it just took FOREVER to partition the darn thing!


Anyways, set all the stuff in the BIOS to defaults... and am starting to format the drives. I'll eventually install the OS and see how this thing behaves.

Oh, also took the time to vacuum most of the dust out, and remove the heatsink/fan. Got a lot of dust out of there, and went and applied some fresh Arctic Silver. I don't know what Compaq uses from the factory, but it wasn't too evenly spread, and had dried up.
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Post by punkrawker82 »

Also if you're planning on installing Win98 on the large drive you have to use the /is switch...

"setup.exe /is"

Because Win98 normally runs scandisk to determine the condition of your drive or whatever crap it says....anyway scandisk fails with large drives, so I've had to use that switch to bypass the scandisk. The worst part was I had to go through the Win98 install help file to get that switch. That workaround wasn't included in the documentation with my Western Digital 80Gb. I was pissed for a while there. Lousy no good manual writers... :evil:
Past System
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Asus P5A-B rev1.05(Beta BIOS 1011.005)
AMD K6-2/CXT AFX @ 500Mhz(CPUCool 5 x 100)
128Mb PC100 SDRAM
VisionTek GeForce 4 MX 440 4x AGP @2x w/ 64Mb DDR
Creative Ensoniq PCI Sound Card
ADS Turbo Quad 4 Port USB PCI Card
Linksys NC100 v2 NIC
Western Digital 8Mb Cache SE 80Gb HD
Lite-On 52x32x52 CDR/RW
Lite-On 16x48 DVD

Current
----------
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Post by Jim »

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His Royal Majesty King V
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Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

Bummer . . that integrity check is annoying!

I broke the thing up into smaller chunks . . but the first time, it goes through the WHOLE thing . . twice. Ugh.


Anyway, I realize also that I probably don't really need an 80GB drive. Okay, everyone can laugh now.

To be honest, I might see if I can sell this thing off and get a smaller IDE drive that's 7200 RPM. I'd trade off some capacity for speed.

So . . anyone have particular brand recommendations? Ideally I'd like to get a 7200RPM unit with 8MB cache, since I'm under the impression that the bigger cache does make a difference, but don't know if real-world usage bears that out. Thoughts? What brand, and do I go for 8MB cache or is 2MB almost as fast anyway?
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Post by Wiggy »

I've never bought enough to compare to be honest. :P
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Post by georgep1 »

8 MB cache does make a difference on otherwise fast PCs. Not hugely, but you might as well get it since there isn't usually much of a price difference between the 2MB or 8MB versions. $2 difference for 80 MB WD HDs at www.newegg.com
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Post by Wiggy »

It's one of those progs that I've got but never got around to using.
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Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

georgep,

I might pass on the WD drives. Seems like there's more complaints, as a percentage, about the WD drives than there used to be.

The Samsung 40GB that they have at newegg seems to be decent. No complaints in the customer reviews (admittedly far less reviews than for the WD drives), but apparently silent as the grave, and reliable. The downside is that it's barely a few dollars less than the 80GB WD drives.

EDIT: Ahh . . noticed Samsung also has an 80GB jobbie as well.... ack! Decisions, decisions....
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