[Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

[Bill Pierce]

Allen, I have no experience with SCSI drives, but with my Glenside IDE and RBSuper/LLIDE drivers, I formatted 4 gig IDE drive partitions using the standard NitrOS9 format using both logical and physical mode (took all day) and had no problems. I also have been recently formatting 128 meg & 1 gig partitions on the Coco3FPGA SD card (again, RBSuper/LLCoco3FPGA) with the NitrOS9 format, again, no problems.
So yes, format should handle large drives without a problem.

 

 


Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Fri, Feb 17, 2017 9:15 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

> 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-- Coco mailing listCoco at maltedmedia.comhttps://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco