fff@mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) (10/02/89)
We recently replaced an ailing IBM disk controller with a Western Digital WD1006 in an IBM AT running Xenix 2.2.1 and used a program from comp.binaries.ibm.pc called "iau" to change the interleave. To our surprise the program, which performs interleave adjustments non-destructively on DOS disks, trashed the Xenix filesystem on the disk. I don't understand why this would happen. Seems to me the order of the sectors in a track is of little concern to operating systems. Can anybody explain why this wouldn't work? Also, anybody know of a utility that non-destructively changes disk interleave and runs under Xenix? -- Fred Fierling uunet!van-bc!mplex!fff Tel: 604 875-1461 Fax: 604 875-9029 Microplex Systems Ltd, 265 East 1st Avenue Vancouver, BC, V5T 1A7, Canada
karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) (10/02/89)
In article <358@mplex.UUCP> fff@mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) writes: >We recently replaced an ailing IBM disk controller with a Western Digital >WD1006 in an IBM AT running Xenix 2.2.1 and used a program from >comp.binaries.ibm.pc called "iau" to change the interleave. To our surprise >the program, which performs interleave adjustments non-destructively on DOS >disks, trashed the Xenix filesystem on the disk. > >I don't understand why this would happen. Seems to me the order of the >sectors in a track is of little concern to operating systems. Can anybody >explain why this wouldn't work? Sounds like the utility is a little too smart for it's own good, and tried to do something with what it thought was a MSDOS system disk... >Also, anybody know of a utility that non-destructively changes disk interleave >and runs under Xenix? We have used Speedstor (Storage Dimensions' product) to change interleave on Xenix disks and have not yet had a problem. You do need to be somewhat careful; we always set up the disk as having one less cylinder than it really does have (in case we need to run diags on it in the future); I do not believe this is significant. For RLL disks, you need to say "/secs:26" on the Speedstor command line. This utility has been quite helpful for refreshing the format on a few disk drives that we have here without having to dump and reload the data. I would back it up first anyway (we always do), but we've never needed the backup yet :-) -- Karl Denninger (karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM, <well-connected>!ddsw1!karl) Public Access Data Line: [+1 312 566-8911], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910] Macro Computer Solutions, Inc. "Quality Solutions at a Fair Price"