http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/pccbbs/refdisks/mod30286.exe
Head parking software for an AT, should work... :thumbsup:
If some odd reason that doesnt work, this should... Its a bit more flexible , but requires more effort to use. Guess just make a bat file with it. Its great for odd cyl drives though, allowing you to set the sector the park the heads.
ftp://ftp.eunet.bg/pub/simtelnet/msdos/diskutil/cpark.zip
No it doesn't--you specify a cylinder, not a sector.
All parking programs I've ever seen depend on the correct operation of INT 13H, function 0Ch--"seek". And there's the problem.
The BIOS for some early controllers ignored function 0Ch, it's pretty much useless, as Read and Write have an implied seek. AFAIK, no DOS driver uses it.
The other issue is that the high cylinder for a drive as reported by the BIOS may not in fact be in the landing zone--and the BIOS may have no way to reach it. Consider, for example, drives with 1224 cylinders. They're not rare--I have several of them in MFM. Several controllers (e.g. WD 1006V-SR2) accommodate this by borrowing a couple of high-order bits from the head byte (register DH). But if a program doesn't know this, it will park the heads right in the middle of data.
Some other controllers (e.g. DTC) allowed a user to split a large drive (remember that the early limit on drive size was 16MB). So parking at the high end of the first part of a "split" drive is useless.
IBM should have specified a BIOS command to park a drive if that was a concern of theirs. Just another sign of the early "not ready for prime time" thinking that went into the PC initially.
But why does the OP worry about parking the HD before powering down? Parking was normally done if the machine was going to be moved.