🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <objtch.669853362@extro> objtch@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Peter Goodall) writes:
>My father has an AST Premium 386/c which has had a SWIFT 94354-125 drive
>installed by the dealer recently. I believe (and Nortons Utilities 5.0)
>that they have set up the drive incorrectly.
>
>Their set-up was 1072 cylinders 9 heads and 29 sectors/track.
>
>I think that they have 2 too many heads. The system runs but has occaisional 
>trouble with files. Nortons refuses to have anything to do with it.
>
>There seem to be two sub-models of the drive, one ESDI and one IDE.
>Is this true? and how do I distinguish between them.
>
>Why don't they put two different model numbers on them?
>
>
>Peter Goodall

The SWIFT family of disk drives are made by Seagate Technology
(1-800-468-3472).  They have a bulletin board system that provides
technical information for downloading (1-408-438-8771) including spec sheets
and installation guides.  One program that can be downloaded is FINDTYPE.
This program will give the appropriate BIOS drive type or compute the best
approximation.

When I ran FINDTYPE, it did not recognize 94354-125 but did recognize
94354-126 (aka ST1126a) as having 111.4 Mb formatted.  If this is your drive
then FINDTYPE recommended using a custom BIOS drive type with 469 cyls, 16
heads, 29 sectors/track, landing zone of 469, and precomp of -1.  While the
drive's geometry is actually 1072 cyl., 7 heads, 29 sec/tk., DOS can not
handle more than 1023 cylinders.  Thus these drives have the ability to 
mimic various drive geometries. (Don't ask me how.  I don't know.)

Do not low-level reformat the drive after changing the BIOS description.
Use the DOS FORMAT command instead.  A low-level format wipes out the device
defect map and necessary controller information (cylinder and head skew 
factors) according to Seagate and you will need special software to restore
this information.

I could only find an IDE and an SCSI version (94351-126, ST1126n) in Seagate's
spec sheets.


Hope this helps.
Jeff Gottloeb
gottloeb@r3nosve.dsd.trw.com