HardStrapping drive?

[Overlord]

How goes it?
I'll be the first to admit I'm a bit shaky on IDE stuff.
The last drives I had in the house that weren't SCSI
were doublespaced MFM drives. But...

At work, we were replacing some old 540meg IDE
drives in a series of 486 systems. We were putting in a 20gig drive.
Secondary IDE channel had a CDROM.
Put the new drive on the primary IDE channel and jumpered it for master,
just like the drives coming out. Tried to put the parameters into the BIOS
under User, but the system choked.
Tried to autodetect but system choked.
Finally I set the LZ to 0 and the system booted and the software install
disks fired up, created 3 partitions (500meg, 500meg, 250meg) and
appeared to take a long time to load/expand files... finally crashed.

I figured the drive needed an overlay or a BIOS flash (God help us!) for
the antique system to handle a larger drive.

I had other work to do and other techs went to lunch.
When I got back by, system was running partitioning and installing
software. They'd called the mfg tech who suggested they HardStrap
the drive. They jumpered the drive as Master AND Slave, BIOS
autodetected the drive as a 2.1gig, partitioned it fine, installed software
and was off and running.

Can someone explain this HardStrapping deal?
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[Mike Brown]

Can someone explain this HardStrapping deal?

I've never heard of "hardstrap" and neither has Google But what this
sounds like is a capacity limiter. Many modern drives have extremely large
capacities. The drive manufacturers were aware that their extremely large
drives were not supported by a large percentage of the controllers on the
market. To make matters worse, most of the controllers that wouldn't work
with their drives are integrated into the motherboards of the computers. To
get around this problem (to an extent) the manufacturers sometimes built in
a "CAP LIMIT" setting that would limit the drive to a capacity of 540MB,
2.1GB, 8.4GB, 32GB, 128GB, or whatever other limit the drive might need for
compatibility. It sounds like the manufacturer had your techs set the 2.1GB
jumper on your drives.

 

[techno]

I've never heard of "hardstrap" and neither has Google But what this
sounds like is a capacity limiter. Many modern drives have extremely large
capacities. The drive manufacturers were aware that their extremely large
drives were not supported by a large percentage of the controllers on the
market. To make matters worse, most of the controllers that wouldn't work
with their drives are integrated into the motherboards of the computers. To
get around this problem (to an extent) the manufacturers sometimes built in
a "CAP LIMIT" setting that would limit the drive to a capacity of 540MB,
2.1GB, 8.4GB, 32GB, 128GB, or whatever other limit the drive might need for
compatibility. It sounds like the manufacturer had your techs set the 2.1GB
jumper on your drives.

Found it. It's the Drive ID.

www.info.ncr.com/eDownload.cfm?itemid=980790022
It's a .PDF file. Either download or view online.