HD Doctor Blog

FireWire Cables

FireWire cable link homes in three (3) different variations:

• FireWire 9-pin-to-9-pin Cables – also known as a Beta Cable. This cable is he used to connect a FireWire 800 device to a FireWire 800 interface port found on either a FireWire 800 onboard/PCI controller or a FireWire 800 CardBus (PCMCIA) adapter. You would find this type of cable included with your Maxtor OneTouch II FireWire 800 external storage hard drive.
• FireWire 6-pin-to-6-pin Cables – This cable is he used to connect a FireWire 400 device to a FireWire 400 interface port found on either a FireWire

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The most commonly asked questions about the system BIOS and its relationship to hard drives. The following will provide you with basic information beginning with the definition of a BIOS, to identifying key features found in various BIOS’s. The purpose of this document is to aid you in solving minor difficulties you may be currently experiencing.

1. What is Logical Block Addressing (LBA)?

LBA is a mathematical scheme for addressing sectors, beginning at cylinder 0, head 0 and sector 1, which is equal to LBA 1. This scheme linearly maps the drive until the final physical sector is reached.…

5. Why use software for translation?

Software translation is an effective, although non-conventional, means of translating large capacity hard drives so they can be utilized on older systems with older motherboards and BIOS’s. We use Maxtor hard drives almost exclusively, and they (Maxtor) furnish a driver made by StorageSoft, which is called MaxBlast. Instead of loading a driver in the start-up files, MaxBlast loads drivers before the operating system is loaded.

6. Can a hard drive be transferred to another computer without losing data?

Generally speaking no, but there are exceptions to everything. Usually there are no guarantees…

Different operating systems have different Partition Type bytes. The most common DOS partition type is 6h, which is used for Primary DOS partitions greater than 32 Mbytes.

Here is a list of known (and suspected) partition type bytes:

• 00 Not Occupied
• 01 DOS, Primary Partition (12-bit FAT, <16MB)
• 02 XENIX root
• 03 XENIX usr
• 04 DOS, Primary Partition (16-bit FAT, >=16MB and <32MB)
• 05 DOS, Extended Partition
• 06 DOS, Primary Partition (16-bit FAT, >32MB)
• 07 OS/2 HPFS, Win NTFS, QNX ver 2, or Adv UNIX
• 08 AIX – boot
• 09

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Serial ATA cables are available in many lengths up to 1 meter. Minimum cable length is 12 inches, using shorter cables can cause timing, or noise interference on the cable. The same conditions apply to cables that are too long. Though the Serial ATA specification calls out supporting cable lengths up to 1 meter or 39.37 inches, PCB traces from the cable connection to the host and drive controllers ASIC, adds length to the bus.

Example: SATA drive installed with a 40 inch cable. PCB trace from Serial host connector to the serial hosts ASIC = 3 inches. The…

To upgrade the drive in your Macintosh computer, the first thing to consider is do you want to upgrade the internal drive or do you just want to add additional storage with an external drive?

Internal Drive vs. External Drive

An internal drive will generally provide much better performance on the computer and can be used to store programs and data. An external drive will be slower and suited for data only, however it provides portability and an easier installation.

Internal storage considerations

Internal drives come in several interfaces, Serial ATA (SATA), ATA/IDE (PATA), and SCSI.

Most newer Apple…

There are several items to consider when replacing a drive from a failed RAID. If you are building a new RAID, then all drives in the array should be the identical model if at all possible.

However, if you must replace a failed drive, it can sometimes be difficult to find the same model if that model is out of production. Below are some tips to follow when selecting a replacement.

Note: Keep in mind that the controller may or may not allow different models in a RAID, so check the RAID controller documentation.

1. Product life: What is…

1. ‘No ROM Basic’ Error

When a partition is not set to the bootable partition. This usually occurs when the drive at one time was a slave and now has moved into the primary position. Verify that the hard drive has an "Active/Primary" DOS partition. This can be accomplished with the DOS FDISK utility. Boot your system with DOS system diskette, type "FDISK/MBR" and press [Enter].

Note: All data could be lost when performing this command.

2. ‘Not Enough Drive Letters’ Error

After adding a new device such as a hard drive or CD-ROM drive the system reports an…

Partition Offset Information is a simple, single file Windows utility you can run to read and display the starting LBA for every partition. This tool detects disk drives that report themselves as large sector drives, typically 4KiB sectors, and analyzes the starting sector of a partition to see if the logical file system clusters are aligned to the disk drive or not. The Partition Offset Information utility was written in 2005 when Seagate Technology developed disk drives with 1KiB sectors. These drives were never released to standard distribution.

What is 4K Sector?
Large‐sector describes using a sector‐size of 4096…

How to check if a partition is aligned?
Seagate has created a simple Windows utility, Partition Offset Information, to read and display the starting LBA for every partition. This tool can analyze the starting sector of a partition if it is misaligned or not.

In the example below, drive C: is a generic drive (ST9160823AS) with 512 bytes per sector. Drives F:, G: and H: are logical drives, all on the ST32000540AS which has a 4096 byte (4KiB) sector size and an Alignment of 0.

If the alignment on the ST32000540AS was 1, instead of…