[Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 19 February 2017 12:47:09 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).

Show it to us please.
>
> 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

I've  no experience with the SyQuest, Allen. I did buy an LS-120 drive 
and a sixpack of disks way back when, but never had the IDE controller 
to run it.

I did have it plugged into my main box once way back when it was a 400 
MHz AMD K2, which did have an IDE port on that motherboard, so it might 
have 5 minutes total spin time on it. Those are I believe, preformatted 
to 512 byte sectors, so the superdrivers sector split trick bits should 
be set in the descriptor or it would be a 60 meg disk..

Somebody should make me an offer on it and the disks I can't sensibly 
refuse. I think the IDE from Glenside should be able to run it.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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