Re: Re: 4GB HD only reporting half capacity (2GB) -- SOLVED!
Greg Folkert wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 23:38 +0100, Digby Tarvin wrote:
>
>>On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 05:03:12PM -0500, Don Jackson wrote:
>>
>>>Thanks, Digby...
>>>
>>>SOLVED THE PROBLEM!
>>>
>>>Changed the jumpers from "Master" to "C Sel" (cable select?) and behold,
>>>BIOS then reported 4.3GB.
>>>
>>>Just for the record, even the manual (online) from Fujitsu on this exact
>>>drive (MPA3043AT) showed two different options for "Master", tried them
>>>both, both reported 2.1GB. Don't know what is happening, but I'm happy
>>>to have the full use of this rather small (by today's standards) drive.
>>>
>>>(4 options of jumpers shown: master (two options), slave, and c-sel)
>>
>>Can't honestly say I understand why switching to 'cable select' would
>>have effected the reported drive capacity, especially if there had
>>been no jumper changes before the original loss of full capacity.
>>It could be that one of the master modes included an artificial
>>capacity reduction, and the drive has developed a fault that has
>>caused this to apply to both master modes, but not cable select.
>>
>>But whatever the reason, glad to hear it worked...
>
>
> I remember a glitch in the firmware of some older Fujitsu IDE drives...
>
> Nope can't find it.
>
> But basically it came down to using newer cables on older drives causing
> signaling issues. IOW, if you used the New 80 wire cables on these
> drives with the settings manually specified (with any jumpers or such),
> that it would revert to a certain behavior. The fix was to let the cable
> position selection do its magic or to use 40 wire cables or both.
>
> I don't remember it being a limiting of space as it was more a slowing
> down to a slower access speed. Hey, anything from that era is ancient
> history by now. Wow, I should open a Museum... with all those
> 120MB-540MB IDE drives I have laying around. And those Wonderful
> 760MB-8.4GB disks too. I am seemingly collecting, Drives with size
> limitations... Suhweet.
>
> Now to start getting the 120GB and larger drives that only show as 120GB
> cause the motherboards/controllers only support 32-bit IDE addressing.
>
Just as a followup for the archives if anyone ever seeks a solution, I
am using the newer 80 wire cable on this Fujitsu MPA3043AT drive since
that is the cable specified and supplied for the Gateway E3400. That
may be it!!! If I recall correctly, used 40 wire cable before on this
drive in another computer.
BTW, if anyone is interested in real museum pieces, I have some 10 MB
(yes, Megabyte) drives first used with the IBM PC, and even before that
several 8" floppy drives (non-PC) along with hundreds of 8" floppy disks ;-)
Thanks again, everyone, the Fujitsu drive is merrily purring along with
Debian installed.
Don
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