On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 16:09:45 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

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?

Perhaps the Roland recorder becomes confused with drives that are
larger than the 28-bit LBA limit, ie 128GiB or 137GB?

If so, then use HDAT2 to truncate the drive by creating a HPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area
http://www.hdat2.com/
http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html

- Franc Zabkar
--
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