I've been playing with my 40 meg Vulcan, trying to get different IDE drives to work with it. I learned some tricks, and got some common drives to partion, format and boot. First, I have some drives from old PC's that are identical to my Vulcan's stock drive, so I knew they would work. They didn't work at first, the Vulcan Partion Manager couldn't save the partion info. I had to use an ancient PC util called HDTEST to "low-level format" the drives first. I think the important thing is to erase the PC info from the drive. Removing the partion with Fdisk doesn't do it. Once that is done, the drives work perfectly. Those are theWD drives listed below. Next, I tried a 100 meg drive. It partioned, but wouldn't format. Playing around with a variety of drives, I think the problem is that the Vulcan can only work with limited hard disk parameters. It can handle 4 heads, but not 8. It does display the manufacturer and the cyl/hd/sect of the drives (usually) so it's reading the parameters reported by the drive. It is not looking for a particular manufacturer, just the parameters. The key for a 40 meg Vulcan is to find a drive that reports 4 heads. I use an old 486-100 to autodetect these drives, and view the parameters, and the util I mentioned to wipe the PC partition. I found several Connors that are half-height 3.5" 40 meg drives that have two physical disks and 4 heads. They work perfectly, and are much better drives than the original WD's. The 1/3 height drives I tried only report 2 heads. Then the cylinder number or sect/trk number is too high, apparently. I was able to get one 32 meg partion to sort of work. It partitioned and formatted, but doesn't copy files reliably. It may just be bad. I'll have to look for more small, old drives to try. Here is a list of drives that I have found to work with my 40 meg Vulcan. -Paul +PHYSICAL+ LOG. PAGE 144 MANUFACTURER UNFORMAT WTH. PL CYLS ST CYLS INTERFACE ACC XFER. POWER MODEL NUMBER FORMATED HGT. HD PREC AC HDS REC.METH T-T CACHE MTBF L.Z. ST ADDITIONAL COMMENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- WESTERN DIGITAL 48.0MB 3.50 2 782 27 977 IDE(AT) 70ms 7.8Mb 7.0W WD93048-A 40.0MB HALF 4 SM 5 (2,7)RLL 4.5ms 30K 17 1:1 INTERLEAVE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- WESTERN DIGITAL 48.0MB 3.50 2 782 27 977 IDE(AT) 69ms 7.8Mb 6.9W WD93048-AD 43.2MB HALF 4 SM 5 (2,7)RLL 40K (My original) 17 56 BIT ECC, 3:1 INTERLEAVE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- WESTERN DIGITAL 48.0MB 3.50 2 782 27 977 IDE(AT) 28ms 7.8Mb 6.9W WD93044-A 43.2MB HALF 4 SM 5 (2,7)RLL 4.0ms 8KB 40K (Tried, works) 17 56 BIT ECC, 3,329 RPM ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- CONNER 3.50 2 788 26 CP-341 42.9MB HALF 4 NONE VC (2,7)RLL Works in Vulcan AUTO COMPAQ OEM, TYPE 17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- CONNER 3.50 2 805 26 IDE(AT) 29ms 7.5Mb CP-342 42.9MB HALF 4 NONE VC (2,7)RLL Works in Vulcan AUTO ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- > I had to use an ancient PC util called HDTEST to ... http://dosonly.net/ -Bart