VBRANDT@DBNUAMA1.BITNET (04/13/89)
Hello all, ... I have a problem with the ICD Host Adapter and a Maxtor LXT100S. The old LXT100S had 92 MB formatted storage. Since Maxtor changed the SCSI firmware, the new ones have 96 MB. I can only guess that they increased the number of sectors per track from 31 to 32 (the manual says 31 + 1 spare). Both the adapter and the drive are very good hardware, and I am convinced that they make up a good HD for the ST. BUT: How do I tell the ICD formatter about the new increased capacity? I have a fairly new (January '89) version of the software, but the drive is still newer. I have done the obvious: I changed the spt entry in the ICDFMT.DAT file from 31 to 32 tracks. This seemed to work, until the formatter came near the end of the drive. There it reported about 1500 bad sectors. This sounds a bit high, especially since Maxtor specs their drives at 1 hard error per formatted MB. So I wouldn't be surprised at 100 bad ones, but 1500 ?? The formatter printed out only about a hundred, though. (!) I haven't played with the other options yet, such as changing the number of reserved tracks (it's 9 now, for whatever reason -- the LXT100S has a dedicated parking zone). I have defined 6 partitions. The HDUTIL program option 'check for bad sectors' consistently crashes on all of them. The CLDEMO program (a demo of an ICD hard disk cleanup program) crashes on the last partition, and displays weird values for the partitions over 16 MB (yes, I have TOS 1.4). Does anyone use the 'real' version of CLEANUP? Does it work?? The German distributor, Weide in Hilden, W. Germany, couldn't help. They suggested to use interleave 2:1. Bah! So my question is: Has anyone used this combination before ? Does anyone have a newer version of the ICD software that takes into account the changed LXT100s firmware ?? HELP !!! Pleeeease ???? Of course, I've mailed off a letter to ICD. But we all know snailmail, and to the US at that! During the CeBIT fair at Hannover, Tom Harker, president of ICD, told me that they were going to get a usenet feed (I think he said that they bought a VAX or something). But I can't call their BBS, and I don't have GEnie or CompuServe accounts. (I *can* supply their Illinois phone #, if some- one near them could give them a call, that would be ***grreat*** !!!) Any and all help, hint, good advice, remark etc. is most welcome. Thanks! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bitnet: VBRANDT@DBNUAMA1 Volker A. Brandt UUCP: ...!unido!DBNUAMA1.bitnet!vbrandt Angewandte Mathematik ARPAnet: VBRANDT%DBNUAMA1.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Bonn, West Germany)