Large HD on a MDT

[waynestewart]

I was wanting to see how big a mechanical hard drive I could use with a MicroDrive Turbo. I have a lot of large ide hard drives but I’m not so strong on smaller ones. After trying a number of drives I found that the 8gb and under drives I tried worked fine but the 10gb and larger drives I tried wouldn’t work with the card.

However there was a way around that. If I used BalenaEtcher, I could clone a smaller drive onto the larger one so that the MDT would think it’s the smaller drive.

I did this before with the Vulcan hard drive. With the 40mb IIe Vulcan there were only a dozen drives that’d work. By cloning the drive with BalenaEtcher, the card thought a 250gb drive was a 40mb drive so just about any PATA drive would work with the Vulcan.

 

[NJRoadfan]

8.4GB is the CHS sector addressing limit (16383/16/63). Its possible the firmware on the card can't handle drives that only support LBA addressing. While the spec says those drives could be accessed using CHS (albeit capped at 8.4GB), the reality is most drives long moved on. The PC BIOS of the period supported LBA before they supported Int 13h extensions so those larger drives still worked on the machines with the size cap.

I've run into the opposite problem with those USB to IDE bridges. They only support LBA, but old drives only supported CHS...and there is no clear cutoff as I've had 2-4GB drives fail to work with them.