"Franc Zabkar" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 19:00:06 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I know I could have gone down that route, but I have an old drive myself
that works, its just that it sounds like an Airbus with a blown engine.
The new drive I bought is very very quiet - part of the reason I bought
it.
Don't forget we are talking a digital recorder where it is very likely the
machine will be in the same room as the subject being recorded, so noise
is
definitely an issue.

You can make a 1TB drive look like an old 32MB drive. Gigabyte's
Xpress Recovery BIOS has a bug that does just that. :-(

In your case, use HDAT2 to limit the capacity of your drive. It will
then report its reduced size to BIOS and OS, making it
indistinguishable from a smaller drive.

- Franc Zabkar
--


Hi Franc, thanks for the HDAT2 suggestion, that certainly is an interesting
set of tools!

I tried setting the Max size to 40G and 80G, but the 2480 still does the
same thing. (PC BIOS reports 40/80G drive size). I also tried Clonezilla
to clone the working 40G drive to the new one but again the 2480 does the
same thing. I also tried formatting in Windows and all combinations of all
the above - again same result.

The 2480 always sees an unformatted drive, and on formatting always creates
4 valid FAT32 partitions, but never manages to complete its own process,
flagging up "operation failed". My old noisy drive formats fine.

I notice HDAT2 shows a gazillion drive parameters and settings, most of
which I don't have a clue about. Is there anything else I can try?




Thanks a million everyone, this is a bit of an education.




Gareth.

On Nov 5, 12:00*pm, "Gareth Magennis"
wrote:
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message

...







snip

I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. *They do not
have a specific solution, though are very helpful. *This is, after all,
an obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that
worked very well. *Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!

Gareth.

Interestingly, I needed a 40GB HDD just last week to repair a Fostex
multitracker. Like you, I was struggling to find one until a friend of
mine who runs a computer repair shop, pointed me at a local computer
recycler that he knew. He had 40GB drives "coming out of his ears" was his
exact phrase, and was only too happy to let me relieve him of one for
free. My computer repair mate said that he usually had them stacked up as
well, left over from upgrades, and would have been able to help me had he
not just had a big clear-out a few days before !

Any computer repair shops or recycling agencies in your area that you
could try, Gareth ?

Arfa

I know I could have gone down that route, but I have an old drive myself
that works, its just that it sounds like an Airbus with a blown engine.
The new drive I bought is very very quiet - part of the reason I bought it.

On Sat, 06 Nov 2010 13:28:06 -0700, whit3rd wrote:

On Nov 5, 12:00Â*pm, "Gareth Magennis"
wrote:
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message

...







snip

I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. Â*They do
not have a specific solution, though are very helpful. Â*This is,
after all, an obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard
drive, that worked very well. Â*Shame you can't buy the drives any
more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!

Gareth.

Interestingly, I needed a 40GB HDD just last week to repair a Fostex
multitracker. Like you, I was struggling to find one until a friend
of mine who runs a computer repair shop, pointed me at a local
computer recycler that he knew. He had 40GB drives "coming out of his
ears" was his exact phrase, and was only too happy to let me relieve
him of one for free. My computer repair mate said that he usually had
them stacked up as well, left over from upgrades, and would have been
able to help me had he not just had a big clear-out a few days before
!

Any computer repair shops or recycling agencies in your area that you
could try, Gareth ?

Arfa

I know I could have gone down that route, but I have an old drive
myself that works, its just that it sounds like an Airbus with a blown
engine. The new drive I bought is very very quiet - part of the reason
I bought it. Don't forget we are talking a digital recorder where it is
very likely the machine will be in the same room as the subject being
recorded, so noise is definitely an issue.

The 2480 is not mine, I am repairing it for a customer. Â* More
importantly, I am hoping to find a generic solution to a generic
problem here.

Have you considered using a solid-state disk? There are IDE adapters
that take CF memory cards, it could be a simple matter to replace the
old drive with something very quiet indeed. Something that won't every
become noisy.

Only problem is I/O speed. I don't have enough experience with SSD other
than what's in my netbook. But I'm thinking the data throughput may be
insufficient for a large number of tracks with a lot going on. And they
are expensive also. Nearest thing i could find was a 40 gig Intel SATA II
SSD.



--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

In article , Gareth Magennis
writes

I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not have
a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all, an
obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that worked
very well.

It's probably because you are trying to use a drive that is too large
for the Roland's firmware to cope with. There is an addressing limit of
28 bits = 137GB. What happens with older BIOSes and drives 137Gb is
that writes past the 137GB mark "wrap around" to the beginning of the
disk, destroying whatever is there. That is why your attempts to format
fail at the end.

Try and get hold of a 120GB or smaller drive. My bet is that it'll then
work.

Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

You can. Ebay is your friend. I've just bought three 120Gb drives for
a specific project with a capacity limitation similar to yours. They
all work fine.

e.g. fleabay 250720202527

--
(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

On Sat, 6 Nov 2010 19:22:23 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Is there anything else I can try?

In your OP you state that a "physical format" requires 8 hours. I
presume this is a full zero-fill of the drive.

If so, then the average data transfer rate would be ...

40 x 10^9 / (8 x 3600) = 1.39 MB/s

FWIW, that's much slower than the slowest of the PIO or DMA modes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Atta...transfer_modes

Does your new drive, when truncated to 40GB, complete a physical
format in less time?

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Mon, 08 Nov 2010 10:13:55 +1100, Franc Zabkar
put finger to keyboard and composed:

On Sat, 6 Nov 2010 19:22:23 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Is there anything else I can try?

In your OP you state that a "physical format" requires 8 hours. I
presume this is a full zero-fill of the drive.

If so, then the average data transfer rate would be ...

40 x 10^9 / (8 x 3600) = 1.39 MB/s

Sorry, your new drive is 160GB, so the speed would be 4x, ie 5.56
MB/s. Furthermore, the data rate may be include read-after-write
verification, so the write speed may be double that figure.

If you repeat the physical format on your 160GB drive after truncating
it to 40GB, and if the operation then requires only 2 hours or less,
then this would suggest that the drive is seeing the full user area.
If the time is reduced to about one third, then this may indicate that
the Roland is seeing only the first 128GiB. I'm not sure that this
would bring you any closer to a resolution, though.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Sat, 6 Nov 2010 20:40:34 +0000 (UTC) Meat Plow
wrote in Message id: :

On Sat, 06 Nov 2010 13:28:06 -0700, whit3rd wrote:

[...]

Have you considered using a solid-state disk? There are IDE adapters
that take CF memory cards, it could be a simple matter to replace the
old drive with something very quiet indeed. Something that won't every
become noisy.

Only problem is I/O speed. I don't have enough experience with SSD other
than what's in my netbook. But I'm thinking the data throughput may be
insufficient for a large number of tracks with a lot going on. And they
are expensive also. Nearest thing i could find was a 40 gig Intel SATA II
SSD.

I don't think that would be a problem, but not being at all familiar with
audio equipment, so I could be wrong. There's CF out there that supports
600X write speeds and also support UDMA. I have a Transcend 8GB CF that
gets 25MB/s sustained write speeds.

"Franc Zabkar" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 6 Nov 2010 19:22:23 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Is there anything else I can try?

In your OP you state that a "physical format" requires 8 hours. I
presume this is a full zero-fill of the drive.

If so, then the average data transfer rate would be ...

40 x 10^9 / (8 x 3600) = 1.39 MB/s

FWIW, that's much slower than the slowest of the PIO or DMA modes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Atta...transfer_modes

Does your new drive, when truncated to 40GB, complete a physical
format in less time?

- Franc Zabkar
--


The 2480 can either do a "quick format" or a physical format. Its the
physical format that takes 8 hours, then fails, the quick one takes maybe 30
secs to create the 4 partitions, then fails. I haven't tried a physical
format on the truncated drive.

I spent a long time playing with the HDAT2 program you pointed me to,
thanks. Tried many/all things. There is a function to change the max
LBA, and also to change the number of bits it uses, but unfortunatley none
of these changes are valid!

Changing drive size works fine though, but as another poster pointed out, it
looks like it may be the LBA bit size that is the problem.

Anyway I have learnt a lot about IDE drives now, and have found a new 80G
WD drive online which I have ordered, as I have now given up!!



Thanks to everyone, I am now much the wiser. (anyone interested, download
HDAT2 and have a play!!)



Gareth.