IDE Drive Problems


Files larger than about 128K are corrupted when copied to or from an IDE hard drive. Solution: set MaxTransfer for every partition on the hard drive to 0x0001FE00, or 128K. Older IDE drives may even require setting MaxTransfer to 0x0000FFFF, or 64K. It's even possible that some newer drives may need a setting of 0x0000FE00. This problem is due to the way some IDE hard drives respond to requests for large blocks of data. (Note that MaxTransfer is NOT "maximum transfer rate," but rather "Maximum Transfer Size.")

Some IDE drives may not be consistently ready on powerup; this can cause the A4000 to fail to boot. The machine may just sit there with the drive light on or off, or it may come up with the purple "Insert Floppy" screen. The Seagate ST3144A drives do this once in a while; you may hear a clicking as the drive does its self-test then decides it's not up to booting today. It may work after a reset, or may require a power-down to revive it. This problem may occur more often with a master-slave drive setup.


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