Had BASF6188 hard drive and WD1006-MM1 controller lying around for a while, but never had time to fiddle with them until recently.
First BASF6188
After powering the hard drive, the red light was blinking.
By searching for error code 5, I found that it is REZERO fail after power on:
I had a feeling that it might be some hardware issue, so I removed the drive lid to see what is going on inside.
As you can see from the video, the head cannot move to the edge of the disc, something is blocking it. After a quick inspection, I found a screw on the other side of the drive that was meant to attach the drive to the plate and was just too long and was blocking the full rotation of the server motor! After removing the screw, the head could move freely!
Later I connected BASF6188 to the WD1006-MM1 controller. It seems WD1006-MM1 does not have onboard bios with low-level formatting software. So it must be used with some other software or PC bios.
To make this controller work I have disabled all IDE-related stuff on my Pentium PC.
Then I guess worked parameters of the drive. I tried several from the stason.org website, but those did not work. From the sticker on the drive, I only know that it is BASF6188 and nothing else. From the internals of the drive, I know it has two discs and two or four? heads. In this BASF6188 manual, we see that it has
In the hard drive bible, I found:
On stason.org I found one with a similar amount of cylinders but twice the size due to having 4 heads:
So, long story short, I found such parameters for my BASF 6188:
CYLINDERS 360, HEADS 2, PRECOMPENSATION 128, LANDING ZONE 359, SECTORS/TRACK 17
It gives a whooping 6MB of space 🙂
This head count is a bit confusing. This drive probably has 4 heads, I cannot tell it from looking into it, but logcly it should have a head for each side of disk, and it has 2 discs. But in bios, whnever i set 2 heads, it calculates 6mb, but when formatting it goes head 3,2,1,0… so it seems it counts 4 heads. But if it has 4 heads, then drive size should be larger. whenever i set 4 heads in bios, it starts counting like 7,6,5…etc when formatting. And formatting fails with multiple bad tracks. So its either bios does not understand something correctly, drive is faulty or I do not understing it fully 🙂
So I am not sure if this is the correct configuration for this particular drive, but it works. After setting all of this I was able to low-lever format it using PC bios itself. After restarting, did FDISK and FORMAT c: and that it, the drive was functional.
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