I just got a seagate st 225

and im having trouble.

when my ibm pc boots up it detects two drives

when i only have one

When i try to make a partition with fdisk it says it cannot use drive 1

changing the jumpers dosn't do anything.

what the hell is going on?

https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/seagate/ST225-21MB-5-25-HH-MFM-ST412.html

Shows the jumper settings (and lots of info):
15-16 for drive 1.

Bad ribbon cable/controller?

you mean the website i looked at, before i posted this thread?

And no its not the ribbon cables either, i just checked.

im stumped

Haven't used an MFM drive since the late 80's. Did they have the twisted part of the ribbon cable or were that later drives? Have you tried another utility on the drive? Like Spin-Rite? Something that massages the controller directly. There are lots of other low-level tools - I just don't remember their name, atm.

http://www.lanet.lv/simtel.net/msdos/diskutil-pre.html

NAH its all good it turns out i needed to do a low level format with debug

the pins and the jumpers where correct.

Oh by the way, SPINRITE wont work on anything that doesn't have a CGA graphics card, bare minimum.

I've actually tried this.