[comp.sys.sequent] Fujitsu M2372 formatting info

aoki@faerie.Berkeley.EDU (Paul M. Aoki) (01/07/89)

That's right, M23*7*2, not M23*8*2 (Swallow 5).

I am given to understand that these beasts are running fine on
somebody's Symmetry somewhere (Sequent doesn't support them).
Unfortunately, the helpful, nice people who gave me to understand this
were *not* the people whose bid was lowest (praise be to University
Purchasing, who saved us money and cost us decent support).  When you
don't buy from people they tend to be less helpful and nice, so now we
have two M2372 disks but no formatting info.  [ No flames, please,
that's not the whole story. ]

As far as the /etc/disktab entry goes, I can figure out everything
except "ns".  Following the wonderful instructions in the Fujitsu
manual I get ns#80.  That's fine with me, but the Swallow 5 entry is
ns#81, and

	ns * nt * nc+3 * 512 = 81 * 27 * 748 * 512 = 838MB

which is not the size of a Swallow 5.  So the Sequent folks did
something funny -- they aren't using all of the disk.  On the other
had, the M2351 entry is what you would expect, so now I don't know
what to believe.

Anyone out there have a working disktab entry (plus any random driver
hacks, if any) for a M2372 on a ZD controller?
----------------
Paul M. Aoki
CS Division, Dept. of EECS // UCB // Berkeley, CA 94720		(415) 642-1863
aoki@postgres.Berkeley.EDU					...!ucbvax!aoki

stan@hydra.gatech.EDU (Stan Corbin) (01/07/89)

In article <8614@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> aoki@postgres.Berkeley.EDU (Paul M. Aoki) writes:
>As far as the /etc/disktab entry goes, I can figure out everything
>except "ns".  Following the wonderful instructions in the Fujitsu
>manual I get ns#80.  That's fine with me, but the Swallow 5 entry is
>ns#81, and
>
>	ns * nt * nc+3 * 512 = 81 * 27 * 748 * 512 = 838MB
>
>which is not the size of a Swallow 5.  So the Sequent folks did
>something funny -- they aren't using all of the disk.

I believe that zdformat uses one "spare" sector at the end of each track
for remapping bad sectors.  Therefore, the number for ns in /etc/disktab
should be one less than the actual number of sectors per track that the
drive has.  In other words, when computing the capacity of the drive, you
should use ns+1 (just like you used nc+3).  Also, if you are trying to
compute the total unformated capacity, you should used the actual sector
size including headers (I think usually around 600 - 650) rather than
512.

-- 
Stan Corbin					       stan@prism.gatech.edu
Office of Computing Services			       ...!gatech!prism!stan
Georgia Institute of Technology 
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0275