mike@ronin.cc.umich.edu (Michael Nowak) (12/25/87)
I recently bought a MiniScribe 3650, a 40M hard drive. I had it set up with a Western Digitial Control and an external power supply box. When I ran FDISK, it said it couldn't read or write to the drive. I fooled around with it for a bit and then I came across a formatter program called Prep which comes with Zenith machines. I 'Prep'ed the drive and then FDISK recognized it. Unfortunately, Prep made it into a 20 M drive. Is there a generic prep program I can use where I tell it about cylinders, tracks, etc and it will format the drive to the appropriate size? I would appreciate any help you can give. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In Real Life: Michael Nowak Via Internet: mike@ronin.cc.umich.edu Via UUCP: uunet!umix!ronin.cc.umich.edu!mike Working for but in no way representing the University of Michigan. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
mike@ronin.cc.umich.edu (Michael Nowak) (12/26/87)
Thank you to Mirian Clifford and especially to Clarence W. Wilkerson Jr. It turns out that XT style disk controllers have a built-in formatter. It can be invoked using: DEBUG g=c800:05 You need to know some information about the drive you are formatting. My drive did not come with a spec sheet so I do no know what these should be for a MiniScribe 3650. I need to know: Total Cylinders Total Heads (I think this is 6) Write Precomp Cylinder Starting Reduced Write Cylinder Max Correctable Error Burst Length CCB Option Byte If any one has a MiniScribe 3650, I could really use this information! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In Real Life: Michael Nowak Via Internet: mike@ronin.cc.umich.edu Via UUCP: uunet!umix!ronin.cc.umich.edu!mike Working for but in no way representing the University of Michigan. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T20@PSUVM.BITNET (Stephen G. Simpson) (12/27/87)
For a Miniscribe 3650, the number of heads is 6 and the number of
cylinders is 809. I don't know the other information you asked for,
but I didn't need it when I formatted my 3650 with an Adaptec 2070A
RLL controller. The only other piece of information I needed was the
step pulse rate, 3. By the way, my 3650 and Adaptec 2070A are performing
flawlessly. 60 megabytes for about $400 -- not bad! This is a good
solution for somebody who needs 60 megs in a half-height drive for not
too much money.
mike@ronin.cc.umich.edu (Michael Nowak) (12/28/87)
Thank you for your responses. Here are the answers I got: Total Cylinders: 809 Total Heads: 6 Write Precomp Cyl: 128 or 300 Reduced Write Start Cyl:810 or 852 Max Correctable Burst: 11 CCB Option byte: 7 or 5 I used the first set of numbers. I'm not sure why I get different numbers from different people. Are the differences great enough that I should reformat again? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In Real Life: Michael Nowak Via Internet: mike@ronin.cc.umich.edu Via UUCP: uunet!umix!ronin.cc.umich.edu!mike Working for but in no way representing the University of Michigan. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------