Help Needed -- ca.'92 HDD & USB Adapter Won't Play Nice

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starhawk

[H]F Junkie
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A little background first.

Mom got her first IBM clone system in 1992 IIRC -- I'm not quite sure what was before that (I was 6) but I'm pretty sure it was an Amiga. The fancy new PC that was Mom's '92 birthday present was MINE ALL MINE MUHAHAHA *ahem* in 1997 or so. I've kept it running since!

As a bit of fun, I wanted to put my copy of HDTune Free at the original drive (which I still have!) from that system, as part of something else I'm doing that will get posted elsewhere on [H] later. The drive is a Quantum ProDrive ELS model ELS85A or ELS85AT (the presence of the trailing 'T' depends on who you ask) -- an IDE/PATA 85mb HDD. That's not a typo -- it really is eighty-five megabytes! (...which works out to a mere 59 floppy disks in size, in case you were wondering...)

Trouble is, my shiny gently-used Acer laptop with Win7 won't recognize the drive. I have a hunch as to what's going on, but I'm not sure of how to fix it. Back in the "good ol' days" a hard drive would come with the information required to set it up inside a paper manual -- the drives back then were not smart enough to tell a computer their size and technical details. So on the system involved, I'd enter BIOS Setup and feed the damn thing the following info --

Cylinders: 977
Heads: 10
Sectors:17
Landing Zone: 977
Write Precomp / Buffer -- 65535 (or "disabled" if available)

Unfortunately, my eBay-issue USB-to-IDE-and-SATA adapter (I'm powering the drive with an old Dell 200W ATX supply that works fine with the usual paperclip trick) seems to have forgotten about this kind of drive and assumes that the OS can set things up. Of course Win7 has never heard of this relic and doesn't know how to configure it, particularly since it can't cough up the info Win7 expects it to cough up -- the config data above.

Is there a way to configure Win7 to allow this drive to work, or must I throw together an XP box from spare junk and enter info into BIOS in order to get things rolling? I'd really rather avoid the 'build a box' route if I can... it'd just be a real pain in the ass for one little drive test...
 
Is there a way to configure Win7 to allow this drive to work, or must I throw together an XP box from spare junk and enter info into BIOS in order to get things rolling?
Click to expand...

I am not sure that would do the trick however I would just boot off a linux live usbstick and see if that recognizes the drive.

Edit: Hmm. You want windows to see the drive so you can run hdtune on it?
 
Yes, exactly. Last time I connected it (IIRC I had a spare XP desktop, which I don't right now) it fired up fine with a single bad sector as the only issue. But that was a year or two ago, and I want to see how it's aging ;)

The problem is, as pointed out by my local tech shop, it's so old that it won't respond to the AT_IDENTIFY command that spits out all its proper parameters to the computer. This drive MUST be manually set up. The question is, how to do it in W7, if there is a way at all.

If I absolutely have to I have an OS-free spare box that I could stuff XP onto long enough to make this work, but that would take a few more consecutive hours than I'd like to put into this.
 
Unfortunately, you have a sub-512MB drive which is about where LBA drives started appearing. Your drive needed a PATA adapter which supported actual or translatable CHS settings which you are unlikely to find support for on any current USB adapters.
 
OK, where could I get one, assuming such things still exist? IDK if it helps, but I do have a USB COMPort adapter if needed.
 
It's not an OS issue, it's a BIOS issue. You'll need a motherboard with a BIOS you can program the settings into - good luck with *THAT*...
 
I guess I'll have to stuff XP onto that spare box then... that seriously sucks...
 
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