[Coco] Fixing OS-9 format for those that "roll their own"

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 14 November 2013 21:23:15 Theodore (Alex) Evans did opine:

> On 11/14/2013 06:11 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > I am not convinced the numsides checking is correct for a hard drive.
> > 
> > Why? We access hard drives, or at least the superscsi drivers I use
> > do, by addressing the LSN, and the drive is smart enough to figure
> > out the side/platter that LSN is on.  So our descriptors should be
> > considered complete when they simply say its a hard drive.
> > 
> > Do we have drivers that do care?  That I don't know.  Discuss?
> 
> I am with Gene.  I don't get it.  So long as the descriptor settings
> (dmode) match that of the disk what does it matter with a hard drive?
> These only seem worthwhile settings to worry about for removable media
> and even then consistency is the key.
> 
I am in violent agreement.  The next time I hobble down to the vicinity of 
my machine, which has 2 1gb drives, I'll make it a point to play with that 
on the 2nd drive, without formatting the drive since its my backup drive, 
and see if it gives a rats a.  But I can modify the descriptor with dmode, 
and the drive with ded, which should be enough to detect if anything else 
cares.

The hobble is because I tore some ligaments in a knee the last week of 
Sept, and while I've stacked the crutches in the corner 2 weeks ago, I 
still have a quite noticeable limp.  Between diabetes and old age, one of 
them is going to be the ~30~ to my story.  Some day. :(  But not right now, 
I still have too much stuff to do & nowhere near done with it. :)

Sorta like the guy that said he started with nothing and still had most of 
it. ;-)

Cheers, Gene
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