1/26/98

I cut back on my Upgrade project due to
lack of funds. My main priority was to 
replace the 850Mb drive which was causing
most of my crashes, and corrupting data. 
Inspection revealed a puncture in the silver 
tape seal on one side of the drive cavity. 
I took the opportunity to upgrade to windows
95, so an extra 16mb Simm was also purchased.
 I had backed up stuff to my original 220mb
drive. My new drive was a WD 5.1 Gigabyte
model, at the same price as a WD 3.1 GB 
EIDE model. Since I used an older 486 
with the on-board controller I needed
the EZ drive software to support this large
of a hard drive. Eventually I got the 
new hard drive up and running with 
windows 95 loaded. 

Now the problem.
My device manager showed a yellow warning  
for the ESDI controller and drives. 
This was revealed by the performance TAB
as MS-DOS compatability Mode Paging on
all the drive letters, meaning I could not
enable the 32bit transfer mode. 

 In the Windows Topic help
 This is attributed to Win95 not being able
 to replace an original driver in config.sys 
 with a Windows 95 version driver, but 
 there wasn't anything in the config
 to cause this, as everything had been
 remarked out prior. Checking the Hard
 drive manual again, it appeared I was 
 going to have to reformat and use FDisk
 to enable 32bit transfers. I cleaned up
 the 220Mb slave drive to prepare for
 backing it up. Then I decided to see 
 if I could fix my problem by using EZ
 drive on the 220mb drive since it was 
 also a Caviar model. Enabling EZ drive
 for this model didn't fix the compatability
 mode paging, but it did fudge the boot up
 information so all the information I had
 backed up to it was replaced by an 
 earlier incarnation of data on the drive,
 including a failed LINUX installation. 
 It was as if I had performed an Unformat
 operation. I tried different things to 
 get all my backed up data back. Finally,
 pissed off at the whole thing,
 I set the CMOS settings for the Second 
 drive to NONE. Upon rebooting Win95 my MS-DOS 
 Compatibility mode problem went away...

The lesson is that the Windows95 IOS setup will 
put a turnequet on your neck to stop 
a cut on your chin from bleeding. In this
case the Chin was the old hardrive incapable
of current LBA Translating schemes, and the 
Neck is the hard drive controller  that
has to deal with both the primary master
and the primary slave drives.