hb@vpnet.chi.il.us (hank barta) (06/06/90)
I have a problem using a hard disk drive and disk controller together. These units are purchased from different dealers, so neither one has experience with the combination or seems able to help me. I am replacing a WD1006-MM2 (MFM) controller with a WD1006-VSR2 (RLL) controller. I am using this on a Priam V185A drive. The problem seems to be formatting the drive. My first attempts at formatting this drive were with the program supplied with the RLL controller - WDFMT.EXE 2.10, which I believe is provided by Western Digital. (A choose the options 1166 Cylinders, 512 write precomp, 26 sectors, 7 heads, 1(:1) interleave and 1 skew with no alternate sector), The sector test runs with no problem but the surface analysis reports ~2 flaws per cylinder, typically (!) locating 100 errors in 47 or 48 cylinders. After several tries at reformatting the drive, I concluded that RLL was not to be for my drive and reinstalled my old MFM controller. I used the same program (WDFMT.EXE) to format the drive. (same settings except the default 17 sectors). To my suprise, the surface scan still reported numerous errors! (I had been running Unix for six months from this controller/drive combo so I suspect the problem is in WDFMT.EXE. I re-installed the RLL controller and reformatted using the on board bios/formatter. Except for the fact that the on board S/W will only format the first 1024 cylinders, the drive now appears to be working fine. (If you've stuck with me for this long thanks! I'm trying not to leave anything important out :-) My questions are: 1. Is the Priam V185A an RLL certified drive? (My release notes (SCO Unix operating system) list the Priam V185 as RLL certified. 2. What third party software is capable of doing the low level format on the Priam V185A/WD1006-VSR2 combination for all 1166 cylinders? 3. What are the correct settings for the Priam V185A drive foir the low level format? 4. (Of somewhat less importance:) I actually ran Unix on the drive using both cards following format with WDFMT.EXE With the MFM controller, numerous disk errors were reported to the console. (OK behavior, I guess) Using the RLL controller, no errors were reported. But parts of files vanished and attribute bits changed (Not OK way to find disk errors!) like ld with NO attribute bits set and only 24 bytes long! Thank you in advance. hank White Oak Software Inc. Henry Barta 0 South 258 Park (708) 510-0578 (voice) Winfield, IL 60190 ...!vpnet.chi.il.us!pswin!barta Predictable systems by design. hb@vpnet.chi.il.us