[Coco] B&B HD Setup

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

It amazes me how slow "fast" systems are at formatting hard disks.  Back in the Day (the early 80s), it took a PC/XT (supposedly using a 16-bit CPU) about 45 minutes to high-level format a 10-Meg drive, and it took a TRS-80 Model 4 (which never claimed more than 8-bit) about 15 minutes to high-level format a 15-Meg drive.  (Let's not talk about low-level formatting, that's overnight anywhere).  We could talk about how much better LS-DOS is than MS-DOS, but that would be off-topic.  (LS-DOS is still my favorite single-user OS -- it has a number of features in common with OS-9 and a few that might improve NITROS-9).
-- 
Ward Griffiths        wdg3rd at comcast.net

<home.comcast.net/~wdg3rd>

----- "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:

> From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net>
> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2009 8:34:09 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: [Coco] B&B HD Setup
>
> On Sunday 03 May 2009, tonym wrote:
> >How long should the physical+logical format take?
> 
> Physical+logical is maybe 2 or 3 minutes because there is no physical
> on a 
> hard drive, even one that old.  Logical consists of writing LNS0, then
> the FAT 
> which is however much of 64kb the number of sectors available on the
> disk is 
> divided by 8 since one bit is a sector for that sized drive, and the
> root 
> directories file descriptor sector, and the root directory itself. 
> This is a 
> very quick process and the ramddisk 'myram' actually does this in the
> few 
> milliseconds lag between requesting an access to it with a "dir /r0"
> before it 
> shows the empty directory to you.  The click click is the verify
> phase, where 
> it verifies every sector on the disk, and any bad sectors are marked
> in the 
> FATable as used.  That takes a while.  And the drive has to go back
> and write 
> the next sector of the FAT each time it has verified 256*8 sectors, or
> 2048 of 
> them, and that represents 524,288 bytes of disk.  That is a 42meg
> disk, so it 
> will do that at least 84 times.  Those will be double-clicks when it
> does 
> that, the regular ones are just the next track seeks.
> 
> dcheck won't like that if there are some that fail the read check, so
> when I 
> was using a 30 meg seagate RLL drive, I used dEd to create, byte by
> byte, a 
> file whose file descriptor sector accounted for all those bad sectors.
>  But be 
> sure and use a good sector for the file descriptor. :)  And the
> limiting 
> FD.SEG count is 48, so if there are more bad sectors than that, you'll
> need to 
> create additional files for.  Name them dcheck-bad-sectors-0,
> dcheck-bad-
> sectors-1 or something similar to remind you to never delete them.
> 
> >It's been going since like 2am! I can still hear the
> click..click...click
> 
> On a 42 megger, on a B&B, it should be about done by now.  On my 130
> meg 
> Maxtor, it was a bit over 30 hours AIR, but the disto interface I used
> with 
> the maxtor is over 2x faster than the B&B.  13 secs for a megaread...
> I think, 
> heck, that was about 20 years ago, on a coco2!
> 
> >Drive is a 42M IBM 0665-53 733cyl 7hd box-stock L2 with the B&B
> drivers...
> 
> You will want to replace that with Nitros9 of course, its faster. :)
> 
> >
> >Tony
> >
> >--
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> >Coco at maltedmedia.com
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Cheers, Gene
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in
> ideas,
> and not in circumstances.
> 		-- Emerson
> 
> 
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