[Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

[Allen Huffman]

> On Feb 17, 2017, at 6:57 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> In the old days, I thought saying yes to the "physical" format of a hard drive would run through it and actually format each sector. That does not appear to do anything with NitrOS-9 and the KenTon SCSI drivers.

Slight update after some more testing. I set the /S0 descriptor to be a very small image, and indeed, “Physical” format did come back. During the time, though, there was no hard drive activity light (like when reading and writing) and I could not hear it doing anything. I decided to let it churn on my 128MB hard drive, and eventually it, too, did return - but during all this time the drives light remained green (idle).

I need to look at the source and see what it thinks it is doing.

Also, during a Physical Verify (to map out any bad sectors), it only shows four hex values and then restarts (format was never written for this many sectors, I guess). At some point, it just froze. The system was still running, but format locked up. It’s done that twice now (after power cycles/reboots).

I wonder if I am hitting SCSI driver issues similar to the recently discussed descriptor issues :-(

		— Allen