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Old 07-02-2023, 08:36 PM
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AstroViking (Steve)
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Sadly, you can't do that.

Very, very old drives (MFM and RLL interfaces) needed to have their specifications set in the computer's BIOS or on the controller card. IDE drives moved the 'smarts' from the controller card to the drive.

The number of cylinders, heads and sectors per track are presented to the computer via the IDE controller on the drive. The actual number of cylinders / heads / sectors within the drive could be wildly different because the controller carried out address translation on-the-fly as the drive was accessed.

Nice idea, though!

Quote:
Originally Posted by mura_gadi View Post
Not sure if this would work, but can you do a low level format and just set the track and sectors to the older HDD settings?

You'd need an older drive to start with, but, at least the BIOS would recognise the drive.
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