[Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

[David Ladd]

Allen,

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.

If you are wanting to wipe the data on the drives you will probably have to
write your own utility as the normal format command only reads the sectors
to make sure they are good or not and then marks the bad sectors in the
allowcation table.

I have a large stack of EZ135 disks I have not gotten rid of because I
don't have a working drive to wipe them with.  Though I would have to say
if you have access to a PC that is running Linux & has a SCSI card or MAC
model that still has a SCSI port you could possibly use tools to wipe it
that way.

Otherwise I am not sure if anyone has written a utility that can securely
wipe data under OS-9 yet. :D  Though these days people think about that
more than they use to in the 80's and 90's.

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On Fri, 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.
>
> What's the best format tool for wiping out sectors?
>
> I wrote a BASIC09 program that manually does it, and prints out bad
> sectors. Two of my SyQuest EZ135 disks have some bad sectors on them and I
> wanted to see if a real format utility had any better luck.
>
> I have two KenTon interfaces. ONe has the socket added for an EEPROM and
> has my old EEPROM in it. The other one does not have the socket.
>
> Both appear to work, but I did have some issues tonight with the second
> one stopped recognizing the drive after it locked up when I say Yes to a
> physical format. Maybe it was a fluke. I swapped back to the other one and
> it was fine again.
>
> I am selling both of these if someone is in the market. Email me off the
> list. Ditto for my two SyQuest EZ drives, and five disks for them... three
> of which showed no bad sectors, but they are old, so who knows what
> tomorrow will bring. I would not use these for any important storage.
>
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