friedl@mtndew.Tustin.CA.US (Stephen J. Friedl) (12/20/90)
[ I'm way behind on netnews, sigh ] Those wanting to add an ST-506 hard disk to their 3B2 can send me their USmail address and I'll send along a photocopy of an article I wrote for the _3B Journal_ a year or so ago. I cover everything: background, cabling, formatting, how to get idtools, etc. Anyway, onto the note at hand: Greg Woods writes: > The 3b2 firmware doesn't directly support any drives in particular. > There is a drive type field in the vtoc, but so far as I can tell, it > only tells prtconf and perhaps dgmon to spit out some arbitrary thing. > The only thing the firmware does is to assume it can find a vtoc on > every drive. I used type 11 for the Maxtor 1140, and prtconf > magically showed a "135 Megabyte Disk". I have really torn apart the monitor firmware and can find nothing that this drive type is used for except as an index into the edt_data file, and there is *no* magic meaning associated with any particular number. Once indexed into the edt_data file, /etc/prtconf looks at the drive's abbreviation (say, HD72) and literally does an atoi() function on the part after the digits to get the number of megabytes. If you feel motivated you can edit the edt_data file and give your current drive abbreviation "HD300" and /etc/prtconf will report "300 Megabyte drive". You might want to try this while demo-ing your machine for sale :-) > I don't think there's a problem with the driver handling more than > 1024 cylinders, but I can't look at the header files just now either. I am certain that the driver can go beyond 1024 cyls, as Congruent sells a 170MB Priam drive formatted to something like 1224 cyls (I've installed a couple of these). I am *almost* certain that idtools won't go beyond 1024 cylinders, and a moderately reliable rumor is that special hardware is required to format these driver for a 3B2. > You could get slightly more formatted storage by useing 1kb sectors, > but I wouldn't recommend that, and it doesn't really gain much either. Has anybody ever tried this? My skimming of the HD driver source shows that it the sectors/track and bytes/sector parameters *are* used from the PD sector, but the driver is otherwise so terribly hardcoded that I would not be surprised to find that nobody ever tested it with nonstandard params. Anybody? > Well, I don't think the 1140's are that much any more, but yes, the > last time I saw a list price, they were ~$4,000(CDN). If you have a Maxtor 1140 and are using devtools, you gotta get idtools. There were fixes made in idtools specifically made to deal with problems in the 1140: this info is from a very reliable source. Steve -- Stephen J. Friedl, KA8CMY / 3B2-kind-of-guy / Tustin, CA / 3B2-kind-of-guy +1 714 544 6561 / friedl@mtndew.Tustin.CA.US / {uunet,attmail}!mtndew!friedl Why not add Hollerith fields to printf?