Really old harddrive giving me a headache

MJOMJO Denmark New
edited July 2003 in Hardware
Recently I tried to retrieve some data from an old harddrive.
It was detected by BIOS, but once inside windows the drive appeared empty?

It is a very old harddrive.
I contains documents written by my sister.
She would like to get them back.

The drive in question is a Seagate ST-1144A.
The trial was conducted on a Abit ZM6 motherboard.(Celeron board with Intel 440ZX chipset)
Could it be the motherboard that is too new for the old drive?

It is possible to fit the drive on the original old board again, problem is nobody knows where the board is.
This method could take quite some time.

Comments

  • dodododo Landisville, PA
    edited July 2003
    What did it appear to be formatted as in windows? What OS is on it?

    ~dodo
  • MJOMJO Denmark New
    edited July 2003
    Yes it appeared formatted.
    Cannot remember the filesystem though.
    Pretty certain it did not report it as FAT?

    Believe she was using Windows 3.11 and dos x.x at the time.
  • JPPJPP Stuttgart Germany
    edited July 2003
    Have you tried to read the data using a DOS boot disk?
    Also check which format can be identified using the fdisk tool from this boot disk. Just check dont modifie anything. If it was DOS it should be Fat 16.
  • dodododo Landisville, PA
    edited July 2003
    I would try it in the oldest system you have available. Your newer motherboard may be confusing it. Perhaps a Win95 system? but yeah, check it in DOS first.

    ~dodo
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited July 2003
    ...manually setting the drive parameters in the bios.

    Sounds like the bios is autodetecting it incorrectly. You might try fiddling around with the 32-Bit setting, too.


    Prof

    EDIT: This might help!
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited July 2003
    Ok, see what you do not understand about the info on the link below.
    http://www.seagate.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?/at/st1144a.txt

    Then, try it on a 486 or basic old pentium board. Drive was last normally sold in the days of the 486 SX and the last of the 386's (the spec sheet I had was dated in 1991)

    Most of the drives that old did not have manual parameters printed on them,so look near the bottom of the linked page for a couple possibilities adn soem explanations of Write-PreComp and at the top for the jumper block meanings. This drive can marginally be run on a Pentium 133, 100,or 75 system, but getting data on that MODERN a system might be fun as you would have to access it as a not PIO4 (prob PIO2 or PIO0), not 32 Bit, and Not LBA. This 130 MB HD is pre-ALL-those-things.

    Alos, if using a floppy to boot, make dang sure the floppy is write-protected-- the time frame when this drive was sold was just prior to the Stealth viruses becoming widespread. As I think was said above, DOS boot floppy is best way to go.

    An old Norton Rescue floppy set is next best, just do not let it try to restore the CMOS on the mobo as you will have no way of knowing if that is the right CMOS file on the rescue floppy set. But, Norton Disk Doctor on such a floppy set might prove handy.

    Best of Luck with it. (Yes, I was fixing boxes that used that HD, and built 486's and early Pentiums that got data transfered from that and "same-gen relatives" of that Seagate HD family. Still build boxes.)
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