[Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

[Tim Fadden]

On 2/19/2017 10:47 AM, Allen Huffman wrote:
>> On Feb 19, 2017, at 11:21 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Sunday 19 February 2017 11:12:00 Allen Huffman wrote:
>>
>>> On Feb 18, 2017, at 11:49 PM, David Ladd <davidwladd at gmail.com <mailto:davidwladd at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>> As far as the EZ135's go there is no low level formatting them.
>>>> The EZ135's IDE, SCSI, & Parallel drives all respond the same way.
>>>> The carts are factory low level formatted and thus just ignore the
>>>> low level format command.  I know the Syquest SQ44 & SQ88 drives
>>>> also worked that way where you gave them a low level format command
>>>> and they just chunked for a few seconds and then were done.
>>> What is happening when I say yes to Low Level format, then? It takes
>>> quite some time, like many many minutes, before returning.
>> That may be re-directed to a surface scan, which would take a bit of
>> time.
> It only takes 10-20 minutes… When I do a verify, it takes several hours, and reports and marks out bad sectors.
>
> I’ve been plying with the RGB-DOS tools. HD-UTILS.BIN will give me drive geometry (which looks odd).
>
> FORMAT.BAS and FORMAT+.BAS report a DRIVE ERROR (or #5, or…) when I try to use them. Doesn’t look like the old tools like the SyQuest.
>
> 		— A
>
>
On embedded scsi drives, the geometry doesn't matter. The drive itself 
takes care of it and only the total number of sectors matters, so just 
pick numbers that come out to the max of the drive. The same with 
formatting. Only the correct code sequence for formatting needs to be 
sent, and the drive takes over and does it without any host envolvment.


-- 
Tim Fadden
"Hey Schmidt, don't forget about the six P's.
Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance!"