Zeroed disk not recognised

Louie is selling her Iyonix cube, so I took out the disk, attached it to a Linux box via a USB to IDE interface, and zeroed it with dd. I then attached it to a RISC OS Pi, reformed with HFORM and put the new 5.28 disc image on it.

Unfortunately neither Louie’s or my Iyonix now recognises the disk (disk not understood, or IDE error), where as its fine on the Pi passing verify and DiscKnight.

Is there anything at the beginning of the disc (under &COO) which shouldn’t have been zereod? I remember something about that with ancient WD drives, but this is a 120GB Seagate Barracuda as originally supplied with the Iyonix.

Is the Iyonix running 5.28? If not, I’ve certainly seen issues with discs formatted using later versions of HForm not work on earlier versions of RISC OS 5.

Good point, I’ll try to upgrade the Iyonix. It means putting in another HD as it doesn’t recognise USB without the boot sequence.

Ah I think that’s it. The new HFORM uses id_len of 21 on the 120G disc, where as the maximum for the old OS in her Iyonix is 19. So if I reformat with a larger LFAU it should be recognised.

Thanks Andrew.

Be careful about updating the OS on the Iyonix – several bricked one’s out there.
If you can – softload the latest OS.

Good point, don’t want to brick it now its sold.

Unfortunately reformatting with a LFAU of 19 on the latest HFORM didn’t work. Maybe I need an older version of HFORM – still got the backup of the original disc, so the one on there should be suitably old.

Turns out the drive was faulty which is why neither Iyonix would recognise it.

I’ve done exactly the same procedure with an 80GB Maxtor (the original disc from my Iyonix), reformatted with an old HFORM and left the OS at 5.16, but with both the 5.28 softload and flash on the disc so the next owner can choose what to do.