dknight@tybalt.caltech.edu (David B. Knight) (02/19/88)
I just purchased a 62 meg Miniscribe 3250R hard disk with a Western Digital
1002A-27X controller from a mail-order company for use on my Amiga 2000.
After at least 6 failed attempts at formatting it I have decided to find
out if anyone knows why this is happening. Obviously, I also have an IBM
bridgeboard.
First I used the utility supplied with the hard disk (Disk Management,
distributed by Miniscribe) to low-level initialize the disk. I selected
the parameters for my drive from their menu, and the initialization seemed
to go ok. It initialized a total of 808 cylinders by 6 heads by 26
sectors. This came to about 64.5 megs. Then I used the partition
part of the program to set up about 10 megs (about 150 cylinders) for the
IBM and the rest for Amiga. This is where I confronted my first problem.
Using the program FDISK (supplied on the MS-DOS diskette), it seemed that
I only had 614 total cylinders available. I also found this when I ran the
Amiga counterpart program ADISK. I was able to get around these programs
and their limitations by using the Disk Management utility, but I encountered
other problems later when I tried to format the disk using DPFORMAT. It
would only format up to a total of 614 cylinders, 4 heads per cylinder,
which adds up to about 30 or 40 megs only. I tried different combination
and variations, but I couldn't overcome this limitation. I even tried
breaking the disk up into two Amiga partitions of no more than 30 megs
each, but this still wouldn't work. It seems that there is some built
in limitation in either Amiga Dos or the DPFORMAT command. I realize
that the IBM has a 30 meg limitation, but at least they allow you to have
more than one partition to overcome it.
If anyone can help me, please send me mail. I am DESPERATE!! I spent at
least 10 hours with this drive NON-STOP, and I just can't settle for
30 megs when I paid for 62 megs.
Dave Knight