[Coco] B&B HD Setup

[tonym]

I finally aborted it at the 36-hour mark.

Surely there is something wrong at that point....


Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: wdg3rd at comcast.net
Sent 5/5/2009 12:13:18 AM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: Re: [Coco] B&B HD Setup

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 drivers...

 You will want to replace that with Nitros9 of course, its faster. :)

 
 Tony

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