I have an old 486 PC which I bought from MJN back in 1991, and the backup battery failed and had to be replaced. Now the machine boots up and halts with the message 'Missing operating system'. When I go into the Bios setup, it asks for the following information about the hard disk: 'Type number (the user type is 47), Cyln, head, WPcom, LZone, Sect, Size'.
The handbook told me to ring the technical support line at MJN. I cannot do this as the company went out of business a long time ago. Is there a way of finding out what these settings should be?
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All of these settings - which are known as the 'drive geometry' - can be read from the hard disk by software. In fact, modern Bioses do just that so you don't need to enter the information. Older computers require it to be entered manually so it can be stored in the Cmos memory. This data is lost when the battery fails, as you found out. A generic solution would be to boot the system from floppy disk and run a DOS utility like IDEinfo (which you will find at www.tech-pro.co.uk). IDEinfo will uncover all this information for you, so you can then type the data back in.
However, if you know the make and model number of the drive you can get the information by typing this into a web search engine. An excellent website is www.computerhope.com, which contains information about hundreds of different drives. The site also shows the Master/Slave jumper settings, which will be useful to anyone who is upgrading and needs to know this information.
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