Question How to park hard drives on Windows 10 ?

[pmjm]

Hi all,

I'm going through some 30 year old hard drives. But I'm only using them for a few minutes to copy them over to other storage. As I understand it, these older drives need the heads to be parked before you take them out to transport them. There used to be a PARK command but it no longer is in Windows 10.

How do I park these old drives before disconnecting them?

 

[BFG-9000]

Do you have a MFM or RLL controller card that works in Windows 10?

One of the new features in IDE was the autopark that not only parked the heads in the landing zone on shut off, but also parked them there whenever the drive was idle. Eventually they figured out how to use the drive motor spinning down on unexpected power-off to also regen-power the heads being moved to the landing zone in case they were not already there.

In the olden MFM or RLL days, the heads would stop wherever they were last used, which left them over the data area on power-off. That's a bad thing if you then remove the drive and handle it, because that results in the heads bouncing off the data area a lot. So before you do this, just exit Windows and boot to DOS 3 which does have the PARK command. Note that none of the versions of DOS commonly used with Windows such as DOS 6 for Win 3.11 or DOS 7 for Win95 will have that PARK command because those were well into the IDE era, which began in 1986. If your drives are only ~30 years old then they may even be EIDE which came out in 1994

 

[pmjm]

Yes I am using an MFM emulator board that my instructor built by hand. It connects to an ISA slot on a 2011-era SuperMicro/Xeon system I have that's running Windows 10 Server. I have no way of running DOS on this system.

 

[helpstar]

How do you connect these drives anyways? If it´s IDE, the chance is very high that the HDDs won´t need a park command.
Which HDDs brand and model are you referring too?

 

[pmjm]

There are several but the one I have in front of me now is a ST157R by Seagate. I am to connect molex power and then a data cable to an emulator card inserted in my PC.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

There are several but the one I have in front of me now is a ST157R by Seagate. I am to connect molex power and then a data cable to an emulator card inserted in my PC.

The drive model you indicated is an RLL drive. In addition to power there are 2 ribbon cables required (1 data (wide) & 1 control (narrow)) and does require parking before shutdown. In addition you're going to have to know the parameters of the drive, such as the number of cylinders, heads & sectors per track (CHS) as these drives require manual entry in BIOS and it must match the formatting of the drive.

 

[pmjm]

Yes, I have the cables and the drive information which I can set using dip switches on my emulator board. But I don't want to embark on this until I know how to park the drive when I'm finished.

 

[BFG-9000]

Well, if you only need to park the heads to transport the drives, then leaving them solidly mounted to something while unparked until you can find a proper DOS PC would be fine.

I don't know how much success you'd have using a controller that didn't do the low-level formatting. It's not only the bad sectors printed on the label of the drive--which list the known defects from when the drive was new, but any bad sectors that developed afterwards were stored on the controller. And of course stepper motor technology means that a drive formatted horizontally may not be readable vertically as gravity can misalign the heads enough for them to miss the tracks, so try different orientations if it doesn't work (the later voice coil actuators were a considerable advance as they could adjust themselves with a feedback signal)