Uncreative Labs

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 22 Location: near myself

I have a Philips NMS 9100 (aka p3105) and i tried to install an HD Miniscribe 8225XT inside. When i start philips utility to prepare HD the only parameter that i can change (in german) is interleave, i leave default, trick track trick....a Phrase in german told me ok. Well after that i use fdisk to create a partition and everything SEEMS to be ok but it never ends. Heads continue to go slowly from begin to end and again to begin (i suppose forever even if after an hour i turn off the system Smile

).
Any idea?

Guest

you will have to deal with it differently depemnding on the controller type.
if it is a western digital comntroller, the bios may be set up for one-- the original-- drive.
a socketed bios chip from a newer wd card or an otherm
newer wd card may make the system work
many branded systems used a dedicated hd bios.
if the drive and controller csan be put in another xt or xt clone, try setting it up there. the drive and controller are very closely related in xt-type systems.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 22 Location: near myself

Thanks. In fact it's a WesternDigital on motherboard Confused

. today i try again and i swap some dip on hd (6 dip with a label sel):
first combination: hd rattle
second combination:305 cyl (611 before)
third combination:fdisk ok format ok capacity cyl 611ok capacity 10Mb (it should be 20 however...). but good things never last forever, i try boot computer freezed.Hummm...I copy some text files ok.I copy command.com and i compare with floppy 10 differences! I copy label.com compare with floppy perfect. chkdsk disk ok. No matter if first file or after many file command.com copied on hd changes. Any idea?

Guest

aaaagh a miniscrive with an xt suffix!! a xt-ide drive
that is a PAGE i skipped over in my life.
I went from 10, to 20 meg and to 40 meg ( recylcled st-251)
to a 286- still with mfm and didn't look back.
so i can be little help with an xt-ide drive.
I thought that when - sometime before 2035( when i will be 100)
I would set up another xt, possibly as a cp/m machine,
but i still have most of the mfm drives in a box in the garage.
so i wasn' t worried about a drive for an xt.
and i have a drawer full of ide drives for 2.3.486 systems,
but a xt ide is a totally different animal.

Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 8:34 pm

I would very much recommend you use a different drive if possible...however...and I haven't played with this yet...you MAY be able to use a compactflash IDE adapter card with an XT IDE controller. That would be cool, but I seriously question if it will work.

Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 20 Location: Gurnee, IL, USA

Oops, that last post was me again...

Guest

Miniscribes are proprietary, I don't care what anyone says the damn things die every time I try to use anything other than the controller that came with them.

I would say don't waste your time on the miniscribe drive unless you can find a controller specific to it. My paticular miniscribe was designed to operate at 256kb/sec as opposed the the MFM standard speed which made it useless in my 80286 Unisys PC.

Good Luck

Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 20 Location: Gurnee, IL, USA

Agreed, Miniscribes are heaps of junk. You can put Rodime in there also.

Seagate, Quantum, and WD are the best brands to go with in my humble opinion.

I'm still baffled why the original ST-225 I had (and only a few days ago replaced) in my 5155 didn't have any problems. I recommend these highly, and they're cheap and plentiful.

Guest

the "typical" fault on a st-225 was the card on the bottom
there is one chip near the rear? edge that looks like a 14 pin dip but has 3 middle legs together in the middle ( similar to a lm380) this chip dies.
the board can be swapped out
many st-213 ( 10meg) boards say "st225" in the hole in the middle they can be used.very tiny printing...