NEC hard disk DSE2010A acting strangely
I have an NEC DSE2010A hard disk that has suddenly started working strangely.
Please keep in mind that this disk drive has functioned perfectly for nearly two years.
The circumstances leading up to the problem are:
I had a perfectly working P166 with a DSE2010a as the boot (C) drive running DOS 6.2. I decided to upgrade my sound card to a sound blaster 16. I installed the card, but forgot to delete the drivers for the old card from autoexec.bat & config.sys
As a result, in the process of booting up the machine, it locked up, and I had to turn the power off. I removed the card, and tried to reboot so as to remove the problem drivers. To my surprise, I keep getting a 'Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter' error and I can't restart my computer.
Inserting a system floppy will let you continue booting, but you can not access the C drive from the command prompt (Invalid drive specification).
I have tried booting with the drive as slave. In this configuration, I have been able to back up the drive to another hard disk. I can write to it and read from it as if nothing has happened.
Using FDisk, I found that, strangely enough, the partition was no longer active. I set the partition active but this did not help.
In addition, I have done the following with the drive as slave, and then tried to set it primary, all without any success....
Repartitioned the disk.
Formated the disk from a DOS floppy
Set the partion active.
Installed the system (sys C: from a DOS 6.2 floppy).
Issued the FDisk /MBR command.
I have installed the drive in another computer and it acts exactly the same.
I have run Norton utilies 4.0 and it says there is nothing wrong with the drive.
I have downloaded and run from windrivers inithd.exe, tiramisu, and ontrack's free utility.
The results with the drive as primary were as follows:
Tiramisu had no real value, since I already had backed up the drive.
Ontrack's utility said it was a perfectly working drive, with no errors at all.
But it still won't boot.
Inithd.exe will not format the disk, and creates a formatting error on every cylinder.
After repartioning, formating and setting active again (trying to format with inithd messed it up badly) it still won't boot and still isn't recognized unless it is a slave.
At this point I don't know what else to do.
The drive still works perfectly as a slave, but becomes unreadable as soon as switched to primary.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
