2024-12-24

ata

ATA Hard Disk Installation Troubleshooting Tips

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

ATA Hard Drive If your system hangs or locks up during the boot process after installing your new Maxtor Hard drive, either before or after setting the system BIOS, this indicates a jumper conflict with another device on the cable or a BIOS capacity barrier.

If this happens, please perform the following:

  1. Turn the system off.
  2. If the drive is on the cable with another device disconnect both devices from the cable. You will need to test the Maxtor drive as a “stand-alone unit” on the cable. Install a jumper on the cylinder limit / alternate capacity jumper, reconnect the ATA and power cables and restart the system.
  3. If the BIOS is set to AUTO-DETECT and the drive is now detecting without hanging the system, proceed with partitioning and formatting the drive with the MaxBlast software*. The device you removed from the cable in step 2 can now be reinstalled on the ATA cable. If the system continues to hang after reinstalling the second device, you will need to verify its jumper settings or place it as a stand-alone device on the secondary ATA port.
  4. If the system is still hanging after installation of the cylinder limit / alternate capacity jumper, you will need to try the user-definable option in the BIOS setup utility. Power the system off and disconnect the 40-pin ribbon cable from the drive (this will prevent the system from hanging while performing the next step).
  5. Restart the system and enter the BIOS setup utility, set the BIOS parameters to a User Definable Type with 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors, and set the LBA mode to normal or standard. Ignore the Write Pre Comp (WpCom) and Landing Zone (LZ) settings (they can be set to zero). Save settings, exit setup, and power system off.
  6. Reconnect the cables and power the system on. If the system no longer hangs, proceed with partitioning and formatting the drive with the MaxBlast software*.
  7. If you tried all the above steps and are still experiencing problems, the only options left are contacting your motherboard manufacturer for a BIOS Upgrade, or purchase an ATA controller card.
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Basic Information of Hard Disk Drive (Part I)

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

Modern hard disks feature an area that contains information that the CPU on the HDD logic board uses to operate the drive. The area is called the “system area” (“SA”). This area contains for example the drive ‘microcode’ (a.k.a. firmware), HDD Configuration Tables, Defect sector tables, SMART information, Security info (drive passwords etc), Disk ID info and more. These categories of information are called ‘modules’. So the SA contains a module for the firmware code, a module for the SMART info etc.

The SA is stored on ‘negative cylinders’ of the HDD and therefore is not accessible by normal read commands. However, the area can be accessed with other ATA commands. An example of a (more or less) ‘standard’ ATA command that can access info on the SA is the ‘download microcode’ ATA command that can be used to update information in the firmware code module. However, most of the commands that can be used to access the SA are vendor specific. Since vendors (obviously) don’t want users to mess around with the SA, these commands are generally not made public. However, these commands can be deduced by, for example, reverse engineering the firmware code itself.

This reverse engineering has been done and led to development of tools that can issue these (vendor specific) ATA commands and can read/write almost all sectors in the SA. One example of such tool is PC3000 (‘PC3K’). A tool like this contains tables per HDD model, containing these vendor specific ATA commands and also tables with sector numbers on which the different modules are stored, also per HDD model. SA Sector numbers are counted in “UBA’s”. For example, one specific HDD might use UBA 4 to store the ‘DISK ID’ module, where another HDD model might use another sector for this module.

So in short, to create a tool that can read/write data in the SA, you need to:

1) know (and understand) the (vendor-) specific ATA commands that can be used to access this area and

2) know on which UBA sector the specific modules are stored.

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