[ale] Can't use a hard disc

[Matt Shade]

Hey guys,

Having a problem with hard drives. Having replaced my 486/100 with a new
pentium motherboard, I moved the 486 board to my other box that has been
running on a 386/16 8meg for the last year and half (nearly zero
downtime btw).

Should have been a straight board swap as far the hardware goes, but I
haven't gotten a hard drive to work yet. First off, all the drives are
identified during bootup as
a8t/r 84320*4

I am able to run fdisk and set partitions, then even run mkfs. But as
soon as I try to write to the drive, the partitions get all screwed up
and the filenames are garbage.

Same thing happens when I try DOS (even the drive id showing up as
"a8t/r 84320*4"), so I'm fairly sure it's not the OS that's causing
this. But this same MB/CPU has been running just fine with >1024 cyl
hard drives before. I even ran out and bought a brand new 4.3 gig drive.
Even a 500 meg HD gave the same problems. 

So far I have tried 3 drives, 3 cables, and two controllers. I've tried
each BIOS setting for CHS that AUTODETECT gives. Last thing I can think
of is getting a new BIOS (Award BIOS v4.5, release 11/01/94).

Any ideas before I tear any more hair out?

Matt

PS All three drives are Maxtor, but they've been working for years, so I
can't imagine that being a problem.
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mailto:mshade at mindspring.com          mailto:mss at atl.hp.com
                            Matt Shade