Rod,
Well I went and downloaded Seagate's SeaTools diagnostic software and
ran the long write to and check the drive. I tried all of the test a
few times on both drives and other options and the Seagate seatool
application reported a problem of a failure with the drive in question
bad sector or something any way got a red dot buy the drive.
I got tired of all this and just removed the drive it was rather hotter
than I thought it should be when I got it out. At least hotter than the
master drive also a Seagate but half the size was. The two used drives
from ebay showed up in the mail today so I will try them. If I get the
same problem then I guess its not the drive and will have to mess with
other stuff I know even less about Bios I guess???. Lol


Rod Speed wrote:
> DJW <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote
>
> > Bad Hard drive or doing something wrong?
>
> The way to distinguish between those two possibilitys is to run
> Seagate's diagnostic on the drive and see what it says about the drive.
>
> More below.
>
> > I bought a used Seagate Medallist 8641 St38641A 8 GB hard drive on ebay.
>
> > I installed it in a Compaq Presario 5204 desktop machine.
> > Partitioned it with Seagate's latest edition of Disc Wizard
> > on two floppies made from a download from their site.
>
> > All was going well got windows 98SE on it and it booted but as
> > soon as I started putting applications back on it and restarting
> > between each install at about 212 MB of data on it, it failed to boot.
>
> Exactly what happened when it failed to boot, exactly what error message ?
>
> > Redid it all again and the same thing happened. So I put my old 4 GB
> > Seagate that came with the machine back in and reset the jumpers on
> > the 8 GB to non on for slave and as my computer manual says also
> > set a jumper to cable select to set and put it in the slave position.
>
> Are you using the original ribbon cable ? Those Presarios are unusual
> in that they use cable select which was unusual for PCs of that vintage.
>
> > Did the partition and reformat with disk wizard. Started to load more
> > applications on it and somewhere along the line it gave me a warning
> > at restart that the disk may be damaged. It ran scan disk I guess in
> > the blue screen DOS mode and when it gets to cluster 121,289
> > about of a total clusters or 1,048,864 it slows to a ridiculous crawl.
>
> Thats because its retrying on dubious sectors.
>
> > And starts to say that portion of the disk is bad and locks out for use
> > that section and I guess moves the data to a new area of the disk.
>
> Nar, just marks the sector as bad at the file system level.
>
> > However this is continuing on cluster by cluster and I ran
> > it all night maybe 15 hours and it got to cluster 150,000
> > (something) and is still locking out the areas as bad.
>
> You can get that effect if the drive isnt setup properly in the
> drive table in the bios, when its attempting to access parts of
> the drive that dont even exist because the wrong data is used
> in the drive table. You should be using the AUTO entry there.
>
> > Now With Seagate's disk Wizard it installed
> > Dynamic Disk Overlay to I guess both hard drives
>
> No, it only gets installed on the boot drive tho it may well be
> on both drives because both have been used as the boot drive.
>
> > in order to see the full 8GB of the slave.
>
> Yes, thats quite likely.
>
> > I believe way back at first when I tried to use the drive as the primary
> > it only saw like 2.1 GB of the drive until I ran the Disc Wizard application.
>
> > The question in all this is do you think I have a bad
> > hard drive somewhere at 200 MB and beyond
>
> Quite possible and the best check for that is to see
> what Seagate's diagnostic says about the drive.
>
> > or is it that the computer being a 1998-99 manufactured
> > motherboard still can not use the larger capacity.
>
> Very likely, but the DDO should get around that. Thats its purpose.
>
> > In my computer folder set to view as web page it show 8 GB for the
> > size for it. I have purchased a few used IDE 8 to 10 GB drives on
> > ebay that are on the way do you think I will run into the same problems.
>
> If the problem is the motherboard/bios, obviously.
> If the problem is with the drive itself, obviously not.
>
> > And will or should I use Seagate's application to partition and
> > install the DDO again. One is a Quantum fireball with is now
> > supported by Maxtor, which is owned by Seagate as the
> > information I see on line about who owns and supports who.
>
> I havent bothered to check if Seagate's Disk Wizard allows for that yet.
>
> > Am I basically doing something wrong? Have I missed a step or done a
> > redundant conflicting thing? Or do I just maybe have a bad Hard Drive?
>
> See above.
>
> > One more sideline question of many and it only happens when I am not doing
> > anything to or on the slave but I hear it spin down to off is that normal for a slave?
>
> Yes, the default is to spin down a drive on inactivity with SE. You can change that in the settings.