Need to know the number of cylinders, heads and sectors of a FIREBALLlct10 20 hard drive to use on dos 6.2 cmos.

If you mean a flat 'blinking' Cursor at the top-left of the Display.....then the load process did not complete; it halted at the partition table which could not be found.

some causes of this : In order of likely-hood

Invalid Boot Sector (it is pointing to the wrong place,)
(if you have Win7 or 8, startup repair will usually fix this.)

Bad Read-Head on the Hard drive causing errors (must replace hard drive.)

Virus.

This means your never getting to the Operating system. Can you do any DOS hard drive diagnostics? I know a lot of my question depends on what kind of computer stuff you have from the past but many troubleshooting methods still attempt to see if hardware is working using Disk Operating System tools such as chkdsk and so.
If the DOS operating can not access the hard drive- it may not be spinning up or the boot sector may have been damaged by a trojan horse or virus. I have repaired the boot sector with a dos command before. There are many other issues that can also cause this it is not just one thing. It can be badly seated memory chips, capacitors on the motherboard that have puffed or leaked. I have even had a processor overheat due to fuzz and grease as it was used in the kitchen in the processor heat sink- cleaning is all it needed. If you can not get past the CMOS screen then that would point to a hardware problem. Just some thoughts- it probably needs to be seen by a good Computer Technician.

The problem with CYL/HEAD/SECTORS is that disk-drives have gotten *MUCH* too large -- the limited size of each field mean that a new scheme, namely LBA (Logical Block Addressing) had to be created to deal with disk-drives that are 1000 times too large (4 Terabytes versus old 4 Gigabytes).

So, if you have 312,500,000 sectors,
and each sector is 0.5 Kilobytes,
you have 156,250,000 Kbytes,
or 156,250 Mbytes,
or 156 Gigabytes.

Would' nt a surface test with partition Wizard be sufficient ? It did help me .
Best regards .

The specs are:
Capacity (unformatted/formatted):
20.00 GB / 15.02 GB

Cylinders: 16,383
Heads: 16
Sectors: 63

Here is a PDF w/specs

Fireball lct15

(http://www.dll.com.mx/biblioteca/HDD/Quantum/Fireball%20LCT15.pdf)

Hope this helps!

Use automatic detection if it is available; if not use the following:

Size: Usually set automatically depending on the settings for heads, sectors, and cylinders.


Cylinders: The number of cylinders on hard disk. Should be written on drive.


Heads: Number of heads. Should be written on drive.


Write precompensation: Not much used on modern drives. It was used to accomodate drives that had the same number of sectors per track, including both the inner and outer tracks. On SCSI drives

, set this to -1. On IDE drives, it is not necessary to worry about it as it will be determined automatically.


Landing zone: Used for drives that don’t have auto-parking. All modern drives do, so just set to 0.


Sector: Number of sectors per track. It’s often 17 for MFM drives, and 26 for RLL drives.

Sounds like a corrupted or damaged hard drive, if u can get to dos instead of safe mode try running one of these to commands to do a hard drive sector check and repair:
chkntfs - dos hard drive check
scandisk - windows hard drive check

Even if these fix the hard drive problem depending on what sector was damaged u may still need to reinstall windows though

I UNDERSTAND THE SYSTEM YOU HAVE HAS A BROKEN SWITCH,

WHAT IS OS, ANSWER IS OPERATING SYSTEM.

YOU HAVE LOST THE SETTING IN THE CMOS DUE TO A SHOCK, ITS BEEN DROPPED, THE BATTERIES ARE OLD AND NEED TO BE REPLACE.

*************CMOS ENTREE:******************************** FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS ON SCREEN WHEN FIRST TURN ON MACHINE F 8-12
ONCE YOU PUSH THE F KEY A FEW TIMES OR UNTIL IT BEEPS AND IT MAY TAKE A WHILE TO GET THERE.

CTRL-ALT-ESC AT THE SAME TIME MAY TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO DUE IT.

SOME CMOS'S OUR SOFTWARE DRIVEN IBM AND MAC SYSTEMS.

SOME MAY REQUIRE ADMINSTRATION APPROVAL NAME AND PASSWORDS

THE JUMPER JUMPER LOCATED ON THE MOTERBOARD RESET SWITCH********** NOT THE RESET SWITCH FOR THE C/P REBOOT
THIS JUMPER WILL HAVE 3 JUMPER AND MOST OF THE TIME THE JUMPER ARE SET TO 1-2 AND TO RESET BOIS MOVE THE JUMPER TO 2-3 FOR A FEW SECONDS THAN PUT JUMPER BACK TO 1-2.

IF IT HAS THE CIRCLE ROUND DISC SHAPE BATTERY JUST REMOVE IT AND PUT IT BACK THE WAY YOU FOUND IT AND REBOOT THE COMPUTER.
***********IT WILL ALLOW YOU TO ENTER THE BOIS TO SET IT UP.***********************


IN THE CMOS KEEPS RECORDS, CDROM, DVDS, FLOPPIES, HARD DRIVE SIZE,TYPE ,MAKE, MODEL, IF IT FORMATED,OR NOT.

IN COMS HALF WAY DOWN IN CMOS AUTO FIND HARD DRIVE
OR
HARD DRIVE SETTING IF YOU KNOW THE TYPE 1-44 DRIVES
OPTION SETTING
PUT NUMBET LOCATED UNDERNIETH THE HARD DRIVE IN THE CASE MOST OF THE TIME IT IS ON TOP OF HARD DRIVE

LOOKING TYPE, MODEL #
LOOKING FOR THE FOLLOWING.
WRITE EACH ONE DOWN INSIDE THE CASE SO IF IT HAPPENS AGAIN YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO AND HOW.

# OF CYLINDER 1024 AND UP
# OF HEADS 1-16
# OF SECTORS 1-63

DMA YES UNLESS YOU TOLD SOMETHING ELSE
LBA YES
TRANFER MODE ;STANDARD UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT TO PUT
F10 TO SAVE
Y FOR YES
ENTER
REBOOT AND SAVE EVERYTHING TO CMOS

ROD

Yes this is normal :D

The specifications to enter the information manually, are on top of the harddrive. Kind of hard to discern, huh? That's because harddrive sizes from 6.4GB through 20.4GB are listed on top.
C/H/S = Cylinders/Heads/Sectors
The Quantum Fireball CX10A011 hardrive is a 10.2GB harddrive.
You will see -> C/H/S....10.2 - 16383/16/63 on top.

That is ,
16,383 Cylinders
16 Heads
63 Sectors

As for the 40GB model, it should be similar. If not, come back and post.