Drive to succeed


Tip
I've hinted in General Q&A that I had a drive failure and had to install a new drive. As the installation managed to plough headlong into just about every hard drive installation issue we've ever discussed in Help Screen, it seems appropriate to mention a few of the problems that arose and how they were solved.
Hard drives are cheap. I managed to buy two Quantum Fireball 1080TM IDE drives for just over $200 each. The price was good, but they arrived without documentation or driver disks. To avoid confusion, I must admit that at this stage my old drive hadn't blown up. That came later.
I installed a Quantum drive, jumpered as a slave. The jumper settings were easy -- they were printed on the drive. The POST picked the drive up -- the line recognising the drive appeared on the screen early in boot up. Not only that, the system showed the drive with the appropriate settings for heads, sectors and cylinders. However I couldn't switch to the drive. Typing D: gave me a device not found message.
Apparently my 1992 AMI BIOS wouldn't recognise such a large drive. I ran fdisk and was able to see the drive, but only saw 504Mb capacity on the drive. This is the LBA (Logical Block Addressing) issue we've discussed in Help Screen. I decided not to use fdisk to format the drive.
The solution is to use a disk manager. I located a generic version of OnTrack Disk Manager version 6.2, and was able to format the drive to 1.08Gb using it. Later I found a Quantum-specific version of OnTrack Disk Manager 7.09 on the Quantum Web site.
To use a disk manager like this, it's necessary to install the drive as a master. If you don't, it may alter the Master Boot Record and partition information of your master drive, causing you to lose your existing data. I installed the Quantum drive as master by simply changing the jumper settings to Master and unplugging my old drive.
Previously I had created a DOS 7 boot disk. I copied the Quantum OnTrack Disk Manager files on to the boot disk.
I booted from it, and ran dm.exe, which recognised the Quantum drive, and offered me various partitioning options. I chose a bootable 1.08Gb partition. Disk Manager created the appropriate boot record and copied the operating system (DOS 7) to the hard drive.
I also used an option to create an OnTrack bootable floppy. When using a disk manager like this you can't simply place a diskette in the drive and boot from it. You have to boot from the hard drive, wait until a message appears on screen, press a key then boot from the diskette. Alternatively you can create a bootable diskette which loads the OnTrack disk management system to recognise the hard disk.
The next step was to make the Quantum drive my new boot drive, with a copy of all the files on my old hard drive. Here's the tricky bit. The disk manager was necessary to see the Quantum drive, and it only ran if you booted from the Quantum drive. My old drive was compressed using DriveSpace 3, so it had to be mounted before it could be read, using the DriveSpace 3 drivers, which would only run if you booted from the old drive. The bind is that whichever I set up as master or slave, I wouldn't be able to see the other drive.
I set the old drive up as slave to see whether it was visible at all. This involved changing jumper settings on it, made somewhat simpler by the poor documentation printed on the drive. I booted with the Quantum drive as master, and could see the old drive as drive D:. What I actually saw was the host for the compressed drive.
I needed to have DriveSpace 3 installed on the new drive. The surest way was to fully install Windows 95, then install DriveSpace 3 from the Plus! Pack. I opted for the quick, dirty and dangerous approach of copying the files dblspace.bin and dblspace.ini from the old host drive to the new drive. Then I edited dblspace.ini a text file, taking a guess at what would be the appropriate parameters.
Amazingly, this worked. After rebooting I could see the compressed drive as drive D:.
Now I had to copy the files across. I backed up the root directory from the Quantum C: drive, and then copied the old files across to the new drive. This took well over an hour, and because Win95 was not running, all the file names were truncated. It would have been better, before starting this process, to run Win95 on the old drive, and use a utility called lfnbk.exe to back up the long file names and later restore them. It's on the Windows 95 CD- ROM in the Admin/Apptools/Lfnback folder. We discussed this in the May 1996 issue.
It's worth noting that there's an even better way to do this. Hard to believe, but true. Instead of using the hard drives you're fooling with as the backup mechanism, it's really much better to back up onto the network, or another medium such as a tape backup or multiple zip drives. You may still have to use lfnbk.exe unless you have a new backup system that handles long filenames, or you back up onto another Win95 or Windows NT drive. The approach I took was fraught with peril.
Now I had to get Win95 up and running on the new drive. I created autoexec.bat and config.sys files with the drivers for my CD-ROM drive, and ran set up on the Win95 CD-ROM. It didn't work, because it didn't have enough conventional memory to get through the initial phases of set up. To free enough memory I had to add to my config.sys file himem.sys, emm386.exe and dos=high,umb lines, and load all devices high (see More conventional wisdom, above).
Window 95 then installed. It didn't like having the DriveSpace 3 files in its root directory, but it did work. The plan was to copy the old drive files from within Windows 95, thus preserving the long file names. This would have worked like an absolute charm, but around this time, the old drive bought the farm. My guess is static electricity killed the drive controller electronics, but we may never know.
On the whole, this story has a happy ending. The new drives work beautifully, I no longer have to use compression, and I have a sleek, reinstalled, no-fat system That is to say, it is lean and mean. It does have a FAT.
- Neale Morison

Category: Hardware
Issue: Nov 1996
Pages: 179-180

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