randyh@ozvax.GWD.TEK.COM (Randy Hendry) (07/21/88)
I just recently acquired two used hard disk drives for my pc (bridgeboard inside an Amiga 2000 (ibm-pc-xt clone)). They are: Micropolis 1304 (830 cyl, 6 heads 43,345,920 bytes ala SpeedStor(TM)) Maxtor XT-1105 (918 cyl, 11 heads 87,892,992 bytes ala SpeedStor(TM)) Hard drives on microcomputers are new to me and I'm having some problems: I called around town explaining I wanted an XT controller w/ MFM encoding that would handle the two above mentioned drives (specifically mentioning their size in MBytes) and finally found a place that had *something*: Western Digital controller WD1002A-WX1 Rev E 61-600003-06 F019 ROM = 62-000042-015 WD'87 The salesman sells me only the card and cables (no manual and doesn't seem to have one himself). I take it home, plug it in and use the debugger to g=c800:5 (as per his instructions). The ROM tells me that AX should contain the drive #, interleave (default 3) and asks me to press 'y' which I do. The Micropolis formats to only 20MB and the Maxtor to only 10MB. The guy at the store says the card (ROM) should ask me questions and gives me numbers for a Seagate drive (with no explanation of meaning) to enter. The card doesn't allow me to enter anything but 'y'. I call the him explaining my problem, another person working at the store says my controller will *only* work w/ 20MB. So, the card is taken back, but the first person says it just needs restrapping and proceeds to do so. Well, I try again and this time only get 10MB! out of the Micropolis (didn't even try the Maxtor cause my cable is currently too short for both at once. Again it didn't ask me any questions. Speedstor(tm) thinks the drives have 117 cyls and 53 heads and refuses to work. I noticed in its documentation that it works w/ the WD1002S-WX1 and WD1002S-WX2 (no mentions of WD1002A-WX1, note the A, not an S). After thinking about the whole thing and reading the net my conclusion is this: The Model A :-) is only settable to certain MB sizes by strapping (of which neither I nor apparently the salesman knows) and the model S is software programmable allowing it to be told by a program such as speedstor the # of cyls, heads, etc. (This salesman may think this is what he sold me.) Now finally my questions for the all knowing net: 1. Is the above conclusion correct? 2. Will the controller I have (model A) allow full use of the disk's capacity (I've heard that the Maxtor e.g. can be formatted to ~96MB) with both drives connected to it at the same time? (I don't mind connecting them separately just to get them formatted, but they must both be usable together in the running system). 3. If #2 is true, HOW do I do it i.e. what are the strap settings (for each of the drives)? If false, what controller *will* work (e.g. model S)? Oh yes, current strap setting are W7 open, S1 3, W3 connected, W6 1-2, W4 2-3, W8 2-3. OMT, I want to be able to use some partitions for Minix and AmigaDOS. (I've tried AmigaDOS and it works ok on the part that *did* format.) Any known problems w/ the above controlers? Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. I'll even pass on the results to the store owner so he'll know too! Thanks, Randy -- Randy Hendry randyh@ozvax.gwd.tek.com ...!tektronix!ozvax!randyh Tektronix, Inc. Graphic Terminals Division (503)685-3063w P.O. Box 1000, M.S. 63-523, Wilsonville, OR 97070 (503)639-7697h "In Oregon, the sun shines every day; in the summer, you can even see it."