[Coco] RGB-DOS & SCSI Hard Drives

[John E. Malmberg]

Chris Spry wrote:
> Well guys, I got my lot of lower sized SCSI hard drives in.  They range from
> 40MB and up.  I've tried all the 40MB and 80MB hard drives with the Ken-Ton
> and success, when I discovered that I needed to disable the parity, they
> would work and be detected.  But whenever I try to run the format program to
> format the hard drive, I get an error message after entering in all the
> technical information.

The only reason to "reformat" a SCSI drive is to change the sector size, 
and many drives do not allow it.  Is that what you are trying to do, 
convert a 512 byte sector drive to a 256 byte sector drive?

For diagnosing these things, you need a program that can dump the SCSI 
mode pages and interpret them for you.

Neither S in SCSI is for Standard.  SCSI drives, and particularly older 
ones may not implement all features, and tests on some drives have shown 
that many of the features that a drive claims to support do not actually 
work.

A typical home computer does not excersize most of the SCSI features so 
does not notice these bugs.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
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