On Fri, 20 May 2011 08:47:32 -0700, whit3rd wrote:

On Wednesday, May 18, 2011 3:34:55 PM UTC-7, Meat Plow wrote:

The BIOS should recognize a drive regardless of the state of the drives
partitioning, formatting etc. The BIOS via int13 says hello to the
drive's electronics and it reports back its CHS, LBA etc.. If this
doesn't occur it is a problem with the drive electronics.

The relevant issue, though, is that the drive in question was growing
bad sectors; even a 'good electronics' drive might NOT pass power-on
self test and will tell the control software NOTHING useful, when the
wear of years stops it from reliably reading the magnetic info.

Depends if the controller and BIOS are getting the info from NVRAM or an
engineering track on the platter. Don't know when this came about but
probably not back in a 40 GB drive. And apparently not when drives were
160 GB, Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm. I've swapped electronics on two
identical drives one making some seek noises and constant clicking, and
one that was dead. I revived the dead drive and it worked fine for a
year. Both drives had run continuously in DVRs for at leat 2 years.

So not knowing which brands and models handle engineering data and when
they switched over if they did puts me at a disadvantage. I'm just trying
to develop the overall picture logically but will end up doing some
actual reading.



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