21 Mar
2011
21 Mar
'11
7:40 p.m.
--- On Mon, 3/21/11, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
That's the Profile. The Profile can be formatted in such a manner, but the Widget is a
different beast entirely. The Profile drive is basically just a custom controller board
wrapped around an ST506 disk mechanism. Stepper positioned, simple. The Widget drive, on
the other hand, is the 10mb internal hard disk for the Lisa. It's voice coil
positioned, and has a little glass strip with lines on it for track positioning. The
controller is different from the Profile, although the interface is basically the same.
The code in the Z8 is totally different than it is on the Profile.
If low level formatting software was ever available for the Widget, nobody knows of
it's existence. The reason the Profile needed a ROM swap to do formatting is due to
the limits of the code space in the Z8. There isn't enough room for both the
formatting routines and the operational routines. So, if you have a formatter ROM in the
Profile, it won't work normally, and with a normal ROM, you can't format it. I
would assume there is something similar going on with the Widget, but without the special
ROM (and the software to run on the computer to talk to it), there isn't a way to do a
low level format. Assuming, of course, that the mechanism is capable of doing a low level
format on it's own, without external help. Since it has the glass positioner, it
*should* be able to.
-Ian
It's a
pity that low-level format
methodologies/hardware for the Widget drive (not the
Profile) seem to be lost in
time.
As in swapping the Z8 with a special one with a piggyback
eprom?