Gary Funck wrote:
2. Does anybody have any other suggestions as to how I might access the
data on this disk?
There are different levels of "working" that should be checked in the
following
order:
1) spins up. After starting the system from power off, can you hear the drive
"spin up" briefly as the BIOS boots up? (you can also look at the I/O LED on
the front panel to discern if there's an attempt to select the drive. All this
is easier if the other drives and CD/DVD drives are disconnected for the purposes
of running the experiment. If the drive doesn't spin up, check the power cable
first. After that, you may be looking at a physical electronics failure.
The disk spins up as the BIOS starts ok. I can hear it and feel it.
2) BIOS recognizes the drive. If this step fails then it means the PC
can't communicate with the controller on the drive. Check cables first
to make sure the connections are snug. Then check to make sure that
the drive is jumpered properly. The most likely cause of failure is
that the jumpers aren't correct.
I set the jumper to "cable select" based on the information I tracked
down on the Maxtor site for this particular model. When that didn't do
me any good I tried master...no luck there either.
Another common failure is that sometimes
you'll need to re-recognize the drive in the BIOS. How you do this depends
upon the brand and vintage of the BIOS. For example, if the BIOS says "Auto"
select that and go into the screen for that selection to see if it has
recognized the drive.
The Award BIOS on the machine supports the "Auto" option which correctly
identifies the brand and code but fails to recognize geometry. I tried
manually setting the values for cylinders, heads and sectors with no luck.
On older BIOS's there was a function that read
something like "scan devices". If the BIOS now recognizes the drive
then do a save and exit.
3) If all this works, and the device transfers data in an unreliable
fashion by hanging or issuing errors, check that you have UDMA cables
that are rated at the speed of your disk drive and controllwer hardware.
Let us know how it goes ... <g>
I've recieved a lot of good suggestions and I appreciate all the
feedback. I'm out of town next week but will be trying those suggestions
as soon as I get back. I will definitely let everybody know the outcome
when/if I figure it out.
Thanks again.
Eamonn
