john@minster.york.ac.uk (04/05/89)
I have just purchased a MiniScribe M8450 40MB 40ms hard disk card on approval, to see whether I could get it to work for Minix on my IBM-PC/XT clone. (In the UK at least, a hard card seems to cost about 20% less than the equivalent front-mounted disk. Incidentally, PC hard disks are available here for almost half the cost of an ST drive of half the capacity!). My drive seems to work well with the 1.2 XT driver (fortune favours the naive and foolish :-) ), but until I recompile the kernel to alter the number of sectors per track to 26 (from 17), I will not reap its full benefit. I've not tried the 1.2 AT driver. I havn't experimented sufficiently yet to find all its flaws, and have only placed a small number of files on the disk. For completeness, here are capacity details: Cylinders: 771 Heads: 4 Sectors/Track: 26 Blocks/sector: 1 Formatted capacity: 771 * 4 * 26 * 1 = 80184 blocks (~40MB) I'll be sending a `formal' compatibility report when I'm quite happy with it. This mail is not a recommendation of the drive. Has anyone out there also tried this, or a similar MiniScribe model? Please could someone mail me driver correction diffs if there's anything other than the number of sectors which needs changing? I'd also like to know whether my approach of using the on-controller-board setup code to virtual-split and low-level format the drive into two logical drives, and then using MS-DOS to high-level format drives C: and D: in preparation for the Minix fdisk(1) is ok. (The version of MS-DOS I have (3.2) won't format areas greater than 32MB in size). Has anyone the address and telephone number of MiniScribe (preferably UK), so that I could obtain a manual for the drive? The retailer can't help with this. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- John A. Murdie UK 0904 432752 Dept. of Comp. Sci. seismo!mcvax!ukc!minster!john University of York England