Seagate ST9144 User Manual

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ST9144 Family:

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ST9051A, ST9052A,

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ST9077A, ST9096A,

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ST9144A

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Installation Guide

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Contents

Read Before You Begin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Technical support service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Installation overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

ST9144 family drives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

AT interface setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Power management mode descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Drive mounting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Installation trouble-shooting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

© 1992 Seagate Technology, Inc. All rights reserved
Publication Number: 36182-001, Rev. B

Seagate®, Seagate Technology®, and the Seagate logo are registered
trademarks of Seagate Technology, Inc.

, SeaFONE, SeaBoard, and SeaCache are trademarks

SeaFAX
of Seagate Technology, Inc. Other product names are registered trade­marks or trademarks of their owners.

Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings
or specifications. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any
form without written permission of Seagate Technology, Inc.

ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B 1

Read before you begin...

Verify that system power is off before attempting any installation.
Observe static discharge precautions. Keep the drive in its

static-shielded bag until you are ready to complete the installa­tion.

• Do not touch the circuit board or the I/O connector pins.

• Always handle the drive by the edge or frame. Never apply

pressure to the circuit board or to the drive top cover.

Use a grounded wrist strap at your workstation; if unavailable,
ground yourself frequently by touching the metal chassis of the
system before handling any components. Provide antistatic pad­ding on all work surfaces. Avoid static-inducing carpeted areas.

Check all items. Examine the drive, cables, mounting hardware
and accessories, documentation, and packaging. If any item is
incorrect, missing or appears damaged, contact your distributor
or dealer immediately.

Important handling note. Improper handling during transit or
shipping accounts for many installation problems. Always handle
the drive carefully. Do not attach any labels to the drive top cover,
as they may prevent proper heat dissipation from the unit.

Warranty. Contact your authorized Seagate distributor or dealer
for warranty information.

Maintenance and repair. Seagate drives do not require any
preventive maintenance. The head/disc assembly is sealed and
does not contain any user-serviceable components. Tampering
with the factory seal voids the warranty. Seagate customer serv­ice centers are the only facilities authorized to service Seagate
drives. Seagate does not sanction any third-party repair facilities.

2 ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B
Shipping. When transporting or shipping a drive, you must use

a Seagate-approved container. Keep your original box. They are
easily identified by the
ping a drive in a non-approved container voids the drive warranty.

Seagate service centers may refuse receipt of components im­properly packaged or obviously damaged in transit. Call your
authorized Seagate distributor to purchase additional boxes.
Seagate recommends shipping by an air-ride carrier experienced
in handling computer equipment.

Seagate Approved Package

label. Ship-

Technical support services

Product technical support is available for all Seagate products by
calling the SeaFAX, SeaFONE, and SeaBOARD services. These
are toll calls.

SeaFAX: 408/438-2620

You can use a Touch-Tone telephone to access Seagate’s
automated FAX system and select technical support informa­tion by return FAX. This service is available 24 hours a day,
7 days a week.

SeaFONE: 408/438-8222

The enhanced phone system provides recorded technical
information on selected Seagate products while you are on
hold. Technical support specialists are available to answer
questions from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM PST, Monday through
Friday. Recordings are accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week.

SeaBOARD:

The Seagate Technical Support Bulletin Board System (BBS)
is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A modem is
required to access this service. Set your communications
software for eight data bits, no parity and one stop bit (8N1).

ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B 3
With this service you can access:

• Specifications and configuration for Seagate products.

• Reprints of Seagate documentation.

• A directory of information and helpful utilities that you can

download to your own computer.

• The FINDTYPE.EXE utility is designed to make drive installa­tion easier. It compares the drive’s geometry with all geome­tries supported by the system BIOS. FINDTYPE either signals
if an exact match exists between the drive geometry and the
system BIOS, or recommends the closest drive type supported
by your system BIOS.

BBS Location Modem Number

United States 408-438-8771 9600

England 44-62-847-8011 9600

Germany 49-89-140-9331 2400

Singapore 65-292-6973 9600

Australia 61-2-756-2359 9600

Maximum

Baud Rate

Installation overview

Installation of the drive can be divided into distinct phases as
outlined below. Some of these may not be applicable to your
particular installation requirements. Refer to the drive installation
section for specific information on your drive model.

• CMOS configuration (for AT systems only). Basic informa-
tion about the drive must be entered into the host system
CMOS so that it may properly access the drive for reading and
writing data. The number of heads, cylinders, and sectors per
track are specific to each drive and collectively define the drive

4 ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B

geometry. CMOS configuration is system-dependent and is
usually accomplished through a utility such as SETUP.

• Low-level formatting. Seagate AT interface drives are low-
level formatted at the factory and do not need low-level format­ting.

Caution. If an installed drive is low-level formatted, all user
data will be lost. Seagate Technology, Inc. assumes no liability
for lost user data.

• Partitioning. A drive can be subdivided into partitions that
behave as individual drives within the system. Earlier versions
of DOS (before version 4.0) have a limitation on maximum
drive capacity and consequently require higher capacity drives
to be divided into smaller partitions. For DOS users, each
partition is assigned a different letter, for example, C: and D:
for a drive with two partitions.

Use the DOS FDISK utility to partition the drive. After the drive
has been defined in CMOS, you must boot the system to the
floppy drive with a bootable DOS diskette. Then run the FDISK
utility to partition the drive. Refer to your DOS manual for using
FDISK. Use DOS 3.3 or higher.

• High-level formatting. The last part of the installation proce-
dure is high-level formatting the drive. High-level formatting
verifies the information written by the low-level format and
establishes drive access information used by the system.
High-level formatting in DOS creates the File Allocation Table
(FAT) used by DOS for drive access. The high-level format is
initiated by the FORMAT command. Refer to your DOS manual
for instructions on using the FORMAT command.

ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B 5

ST9144 family AT interface drives

This guide provides installation information for the ST9051A,
ST9052A, ST9077A, ST9096A, and ST9144A drives. All drives
in this family automatically park their heads at power-down. Refer
to Figure 1.

Caution. These drives are usually installed in notebook or laptop
systems. These computers require qualified or factory trained
technicians to perform peripheral upgrades. Be sure to review the
terms and conditions of your system warranty before opening the
system enclosure.

Default drive geometry

Seagate AT interface drives mimic (translate) other drive geome­tries. If none of the drive types offered by the CMOS support the
number of heads, cylinders and sectors per track shown by the
following table, and your system does not support a “user-de­fined” drive type, then select a drive type in your system CMOS
with a capacity which is less than or equal to the capacity given
in the “CMOS MBytes” column of the following table.

If you do not know which drive types your CMOS supports,
download FINDTYPE.EXE to assist in choosing an appropriate
drive type. Refer to the “Technical Support Services” section in
the front of this guide.

When specifying drive geometry to the system CMOS, different
values may be used for the Cylinders (1,024 max), Read/Write
Heads (16 max), and Sectors per Track (63 max).

6 ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B
Note that the final drive capacity shown by the CMOS and total

sectors cannot exceed the values indicated in the last column of
the following table as defined by the following equation:

(Sectors)×(Heads)×(Cylinders) ≤ Total Sectors per Drive

If your BIOS offers a “custom drive” or a “user-defined” drive type,
you may use one of the configurations listed below.

Model

ST9051A 42.86 40.87 654 4 32 83,712
ST9051A 42.82 40.84 820 6 17 83,640
ST9052A 42.65 40.67 980 5 17 83,300
ST9077A 64.05 61.09 802 4 39 125,112
ST9096A 85.29 81.34 980 10 17 166,600
ST9144A 127.94 122.02 980 15 17 249,900

The CMOS calculation of drive capacity is based on a variation
of the number of bits in a megabyte, for purposes related to drive
addressing.

When the drive geometry has been entered into the “user-de­fined” or “custom” drive type, the CMOS may display the calcu­lated drive capacity. This number should correspond with the
capacity listed in the “CMOS MBytes (F)” column of the table.
Note that the drive provides the user with full capacity as specified
in the “Mbytes (F)” column of the table.

After the high-level formatting has been completed, the drive
capacity can be verified using the DOS CHKDSK utility.

MBytes

(F)

CMOS

MBytes (F)

Cyl.

R/W

Heads

Sect./
Track

Total

Sect. /

Drive

ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B 7

Supported system BIOS revisions

These drives are AT interface compatible drives. The host system
BIOS must provide full support for the AT interface command set.
Consult the system documentation for implementation informa­tion for your system.

In accordance with the ATA/CAM specification, after a hard reset
is received from the host, the BIOS must reset any emula­tion/translation parameters for the drive.

The ST9144 family AT interface drives use 4 bytes of Error
Correction Code (ECC) with the Read Long/Write Long com­mands.

Based on the drive type, some system BIOSes look for 7 bytes
of ECC. If your system expects 7 bytes of ECC, some drive
diagnostic programs return false failures (typically time-out er­rors). Consult your system documentation, or call your system
dealer or manufacturer for information on configuring your system
to receive 4 bytes of ECC.