[Coco] Formatting OS-9 hard drives

[Allen Huffman]

> On Feb 19, 2017, at 11:21 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sunday 19 February 2017 11:12:00 Allen Huffman wrote:
> 
>> On Feb 18, 2017, at 11:49 PM, David Ladd <davidwladd at gmail.com <mailto:davidwladd at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 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.
>> 
>> What is happening when I say yes to Low Level format, then? It takes
>> quite some time, like many many minutes, before returning.
> 
> That may be re-directed to a surface scan, which would take a bit of 
> time.

It only takes 10-20 minutes… When I do a verify, it takes several hours, and reports and marks out bad sectors.

I’ve been plying with the RGB-DOS tools. HD-UTILS.BIN will give me drive geometry (which looks odd).

FORMAT.BAS and FORMAT+.BAS report a DRIVE ERROR (or #5, or…) when I try to use them. Doesn’t look like the old tools like the SyQuest.

		— A