rick@wam.umd.edu (Frederick E. Brown) (07/07/90)
Ok. So you've got a non-Apple hard disk and you want to format and partion it for A/UX but Apple's HD Setup won't reconize your drive. 'Damn!' you say? Well, don't dispair! A simple patch to HD Setup could be all you need. Here's the scoop... HD Setup has a list of drives that it will reconize as being "suitable." And guess what? All these drives just happen to be the ones that Apple sells. Who would of figured?? This list of accepted drives is kept in CODE resource ID=5 (the %A5Init resource) starting around offset 0x210 as Pascal strings (a string preceded by a length byte). For instance, the Quantum Q250 drive mechanism is stored as: 0C 51 55 41 4E 54 55 4D 20 51 32 35 30 translated into ASCII as: 12 Q U A N T U M 2 5 0 Q where 12 is the length. You can easily see the names by using resedit and looking at CODE ID=5 around 0x210. Apparently HD Setup asks each SCSI drive what drive mech it has and compares it against the list. If your drive doesn't work with HD Setup then you just need to change the characters in one of the listed names to what your drive mech is. For instance: I have a Quantum 170 meg so HD Setup won't normally work with my drive. I went in and changed the length byte of the first Quantum drive entry to a 0x01. Now HD Setup just compares my drive mech with 'Q' which will always match with any Quantum drive. Bingo! Now I can format and partition my drive. The same should hold true for any Quantum or Seagate drive (but I can't guarantee it). I've formated and partitioned a Quantum 105 and 170 meg drive for A/UX using this patch and I've had no difficulties. It may also work for non-Quantum, non-Seagate drives but I haven't tried these yet. Just edit an entry in the CODE segment to what your drive mech is (just the first letter is sufficent, i.e. 0x01 0x51 for Quantum or 0x01 0x53 for Seagate). This might save you from having to buy Silver Lining. Once again, I don't guarantee that this will work (except for Quantum 105s and 170s) but it should for any Quantum or Seagate and perhaps others as well. Give it a try and let me know. Good luck! Many thanx go to Steve Green at the University of Maryland for this helpful patch. Nice job Steve! rick@ra.src.umd.edu rick@bagend.eng.umd.edu rick@cscwam.umd.edu
tony@playfair.Stanford.EDU (Tony Cooper) (07/07/90)
This message is for anyone who patches HD Setup or who otherwise uses a driver that was not designed for their drive. When backing up files using Diskfit, turn off the "verify writes" option else your backup will probably fail. The verify writes option reads the data after it has written it and makes sure that the data was recorded properly. When a mismatch is found the backup is aborted. If you want the backup to finish - I mean "finish" - then turn off the verify option. Cheers, Tony
anderson@csli.Stanford.EDU (Steve Anderson) (07/09/90)
Using ResEdit to hack HDSC-setup so that it will handle non-Apple disks may well work, but there are limitations. My efforts to set up a 580 Mbyte Wren V this way failed: the apparent reason is a timeout present in the code that causes operations like initialize and partition to fail if they take too long (e.g., if the disk is a lot bigger than any of the ones the program was originally intended to deal with). "test" runs successfully to completion on this disk, but both "init" and "partition" time out and fail. Question: why can't Apple include a general purpose utility comparable to SilverLining (which handled this disk without problems) with A/UX? UNIX users won't want to live with nothing bigger than a HD-160SC forever... Steve Anderson Cognitive Science Center The Johns Hopkins University anderson@sapir.cog.jhu.edu anderson@cs.jhu.edu anderson@csli.stanford.edu