d8b Forum

hi all, heres a good one when loading the o/s from the two floppys, i get the the end of the 2nd floppy and get a checksum error, now i have "format on" on my floppys, so from the first disc it asks "do you want to format disc" which i press yes, but then funny enough rather than get the percentage bar going across the lcd showing the formatting, i just get a message after a few seconds saying format compleate and patched ready to go, then load 2nd disc, i tried this on 3 drives, all the same all 32g but then when i load the the drives in a drive dock on my pc its only showing 1.9g on all of them.
so its looking like the formating stage of the floppys is only formatting and patching 1.9g, hence the check sum error, as if to confirm this when also looking on the pc at " Disk management" i can see the 1.9g as formatted and can also see the rest of the 29ish gig as unallocated,
so what ever is formating the drives is only formatting 1.9g then stops
so, what formats the drive and where is the amount to be formatted stored ? in the floppys, the firmware, or the bios ?
things done so far,
changed the ram.... same
changed the bios chip and reset bios...... same
used other floppys... same
battery is ok...

i also get the error if i press "skip" and dont format the drives

just about to change the firmware chip

update....
its not the firmware chip, changed and still same..

I read this a few days ago, didn't have a good idea, and was hoping someone else could think of something... but since that didn't happen, yet... here goes nothing:

One possible reason, why a harddisc might get formatted with a specific size, is if the BIOS was set to a specific number of sectors etc. for a drive... or in other words, if anything else than "AUTO" is selected for the installed harddrive, then the BIOS will use the entered size (e.g. sector numbers, etc.), to determine the drive's size.

In short: When you say you changed the BIOS chip and reset the BIOS (you mean per the settings in the Database, right? Not the "reset" option in the BIOS, since that would wreak havoc...?) what does it say for the IDE 0 and IDE 1? Are they set to "Auto"?

Another possibility would be, if the harddrive was "jumpered" to have it's size limited. The jumper positions depend on the drive manufacturer and model. Check if the jumper is set correctly for the drive... but if you're unsure, "most" drives, should get recognized by the BIOS when simply removing all the jumpers from the Master/Slave/CableSelect pin set.

How is the drive connected inside the HDR (is that the device in question? You didn't say)? Directly to the IDE controller, or are you using something like a SSD to IDE adapter or something? That could be the cause, too, of course... if you can try directly with a regular IDE drive and the HDR's IDE controller, I'd try that first, to eliminate that as the culprit. If there's no issue with that, but you're using an SSD/IDE adapter or something similar, then I'd look if there's a way to limit the HD size on that thing, and if that was turned on, somehow.

Anyway... more info, please:

Which device? (HDR? MDR? SDR?)
What type of drive? (Spinning IDE? SSD with adapter? SD Card with adapter?)
Does the BIOS say "AUTO" for the drive type, or something else?

ahhh Y my R im so sorry, iv only just seen this reply.
thank you very much for the help... i feel so bad now

ok it was for the HDR using Maxtor drives, though tried western digi as well on the IDE ribbon.
yes set to auto and std bios settings
i do jump drives to fit but get them all to about 32 ish anyway as can bee seen when i try the drive in a bay connected to a laptop.

"One possible reason, why a harddisc might get formatted with a specific size, is if the BIOS was set to a specific number of sectors etc. for a drive... or in other words, if anything else than "AUTO" is selected for the installed harddrive, then the BIOS will use the entered size (e.g. sector numbers, etc.), to determine the drive's size"

even with auto selected it was still doing it, so...
i tried yet another bios chip a large bios chip and then put the os on to a 120g drive and it worked fine. just one of them strange things as i run 4 HDRs and all my other HDRs are fine, so all is good for now, bit of a head scratcher that one that i still dont understand.