Gareth Magennis wrote:
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio
multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is
that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see 4
FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the drive.
If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes about 8
hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper combinations
Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

So is there perhaps a way to fool the 2480 into thinking this is an 80G
drive?

I actually had a similar problem with my Sony Vaio laptop when I tried to
upgrade the 40G drive - the Vaio didn't recognise the large drive properly
and DMA (I think) was not turned on, resulting in extremely slow disk
access. After posting on usenet someone pointed me to an alternative
chipset driver that made the Vaio think it had a SCSI/Raid controller and
the large IDE hard drive then worked perfectly!?!

What is this thing with too large hard drives? Is there any likelyhood of
getting this drive to format?

Have you tried putting the drive into a PC and building/formatting
your four 10G partitions *there*? IIRC, FAT32 will support up to
~30G so you could try four 30G partitions and losing the remaining
40G on the drive (which should still be better than the original
device *ever* had!).

Larger disks use LBA addressing and can convert the old C/H/S addresses
to this form -- but, only to the extent supported by the CHS scheme!
(thank the morons who saved a few *bits* on these disks (going back to
floppy land) with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, etc. (gee, aren't disks BIGGER
than "a few bits"??) and gave us all of these compatibility issues...