feejw@stat.appstate.edu (01/04/91)
does anyone know how to disable the sector translation on a 6386 E Tower 20mhz machine? The controller is a WD1007a-wah ESDI with a Micropolis 320meg drive. This is the config shipped from att. The problem I have is that when I try to COMPSURF the drive under Novell I get a error message immediately that the drive failed to format. I know the drive has 1221 cyls, 15 heads and 34 sectors/trk; COMPSURF reports the drive as having something like 853 cyls, 15 heads and 60 some sectors/trk. I've had this problem before with ESDI drives and NOVELL and got around it by disabling the sector translation. Unfortunately, this wd card is not like the others I have used or have doc for. The card has a 62-002068-802 rom on it and 3 jumpers; I tried jumpering and unjumpering the jumpers but didn't have any luck. Any ideas about what the problem may be or how to disable the translation will be greatly appreciated; thanks a bunch. Wayne Fee Academic Computing Services Appalachian State U. email: feejw@stat.appstate.edu
owenc@qut.edu.au (Chris Owen) (01/05/91)
Wayne Fee (feejw@stat.appstate.edu) writes: >does anyone know how to disable the sector translation on a 6386 E Tower 20mhz >machine? The controller is a WD1007a-wah ESDI with a Micropolis 320meg drive. >This is the config shipped from att. The problem I have is that when I try to >COMPSURF the drive under Novell I get a error message immediately that the >drive failed to format. I know the drive has 1221 cyls, 15 heads and 34 >sectors/trk; COMPSURF reports the drive as having something like 853 cyls, 15 >heads and 60 some sectors/trk. I've had this problem before with ESDI drives >and NOVELL and got around it by disabling the sector translation. >Unfortunately, this wd card is not like the others I have used or have doc for. The sector translation is done by the controller. My WAH has 6 jumper blocks on it. W14 controls sector translation. Install the jumper here to disable it. We are running 2 of these drives (1558's I assume) in different servers. One uses translation, the other doesn't. Doesn't seem to make much difference provided the BIOS supports the configuration shown to it by the controller. We didn't use Novell to do the format though. Western Digital has it's own format program WDPREP which does this. Chris Owen | c.owen@qut.edu.au Computer Based Education | voice +61 7 223 2912 Queensland University of Technology | FAX +61 7 229 0874 Brisbane, Australia