graham@octogard.UUCP (Graham Mainwaring) (05/16/91)
Does anyone out there have experience with running NetWare on IDE hard drives?
It seems like a good solution to my problems, but I don't want to put down the
money unless I have some idea that it will work.
I know that IDE drives are supposed to emulate ST506 as far as software access
goes, so that most programs that run with ST506 will run with IDE. This holds
up pretty well in a DOS environment - how about NetWare?
IDE drives often have non-standard paramater tables - they don't usually have
17 sectors per track, and the numbers for heads and cylinders are often a bit
odd. Also, they generally use sector translation, so that the head and
cylinder the software requests may not correspond to anything physical. I'm
told that "Disk Manager N" will solve compatibility problems due to odd
sector and head counts.
Also, most IDE drives have a factory-preset defect list, and are not
supposed to be low-level formatted by the user. (At least one IDE drive
manufacturer says that low-level formatting voids your warranty.) Does
surfcomp do a low-level format? Will it interfere with an IDE drive?
Responses will be much appreciated, either in e-mail or in public. I will
summarize to the net if I get any "me too" e-mails.
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The Octopus's Garden BBS UUCP: [backbone]!nstar!octogard!graham
+1 919 876 7213 Internet: graham%octogard@nstar.rn.comgreg@irl.ise.ufl.edu (Greg O'Rear) (05/20/91)
In article <kR6121w164w@octogard.UUCP> graham@octogard.UUCP (Graham Mainwaring) writes: >Does anyone out there have experience with running NetWare on IDE hard drives? I'm running NetWare V2.15C on a 386-16 with a 110 MB IDE drive. It works fine, but I did have some trouble initially. In summary, don't let COMPSURF format the drive. Just use it as is. I may have used a low-level format program that came with the PC (from CompuAdd, for the record). Originally I got a bad disk from them, so I don't remember which disk I tried what on. I do know that since they sent me a replacement, I prepared it easily and it has worked ever since with no problems whatsoever (8 months). I'm still not too sure I trust them in the long run, however. Maybe if better disk management tools appear for IDE's I'll feel better. -- Greg O'Rear Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, University of Florida Address: O'Rear@ise.ufl.edu