[Coco] large HD in OS9/68K

[David]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 01:19:33PM +1000, Bob Devries wrote:
> David asked:
> > It looks, assuming 512-byte sectors, that it's writing one track
> > and quitting.  What does free show?
> 
> Free shows the correct free space on the drive.
> 
> > From what I understand, cyls, spt, and sides is irrelevant, although
> > it's my suspicion that sectors x sides x sect-size probably must not
> > exceed the capacity of one track if the driver does not use lba mode,
> > and mine doesn't AFAICT.
> 
> If you reset bit 3 of the PD_Ctrl, then the drive isn't interrogated for
> size, but the settings in the descriptor are used.
> AFAIK, all SCSI drives use LBA.

Ahhh..  I had assumed you were using an IDE drive.

Last night, I was looking over the docs that came with my Disto system -
it came already set up.  Again, these are IDE.. It stated that the SPT
_must_ be 17, and a max of 16 heads.  I've disassembled the driver and
it checks these values in the drive table when it accesses the drive.  I
wonder if this might just be outdated documentation or if there's
something in RBF or my driver (or the formatting program that it uses).
I need to ask someone who deals with this, I guess.

While we're on the subject of drives..  What are the params for your
floppy drives on the MM/1?  The reason I ask - I sent this q to
comp.os.os9, but never saw the message - looked on google for it, too -
but mine are 34 (I believe) SPT, but the big rub is that the sector
count starts at 0 .  I got the idea one day to use the fdutils in Linux
and make .dsk images of all my floppies and store them on CD.  Then, if
a floppy went bad, I could recreate it.

But!  linux does not support sector-0 floppies.  There is a patch from
the fdutils site that supposedly adds support for this - you have to
compile it into your kernel.  I did this but still it wouldn't work.  I
get the impression that you might have to do a raw low-level-command
read/write even with this.  Kinda "iffy" to me.

I don't know why my system was set with this sector format.  I wonder if
I couldn't make a descriptor with begin sect of 1, and then copy to
floppies that had this format and then simply use that format in the
future.

Another option, I suppose, would be to use some other standard format -
maybe the "universal" format for these setup disks?

> Regards, Bob Devries; Ipswich, Queensland, Australia
> 
> 
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