2 Apr
2005
2 Apr
'05
5:14 p.m.
At 03:41 PM 4/2/05 -0800, you wrote:
Joe R. wrote (after Jos Dreesen):
At least some CS/80 discs support the CS/80 low-level initialization
command. It's generally not clear how to do this, but if you go trawl
Google Groups for "mediainit vGD" you may find a transcript of how I
got HP-UX 7.05 to low-level format a 7946 disc so long ago that it's
on topic.
Interesting! There's no mention of that in the 7942/7946 manual. The
same method might be usable on other drives IF you have access to a HP-UX
machine.
BTW I do have a HP 9133H manual. Also manuals for the 9133V/VX, 9122D&S,
9122C, 7042/7946, 7957/7958 and 9127.
The HP 7942 and 7946 are really cool IMO. They have built-in hard drive
and tape drive. You can copy the tape to the hard drive or vice versa with
no CPU connected and just using the front panel controls.
Joe
I hope the
9133 is intelligent enough to format the disk itself
Most HP drives aren't. I've only found ONE that would. I THINK it was a
9153 and it used a ST-225. But it's worth a try. However, most of the HP
drives use oddball drives that I was never able to find replacements for.
If you do find a replacement drive, install it and just use the normal
format utility for your system. Most HP systems call it "Initialize".
From what I can tell it usually does the equivelent to a high level fromat
(sets up directory, FAT, etc) but not the Low Level fromatting/disk testing
so it frequently fails with replacement drives.
The message doesn't explain how I figured this out, but it was pretty
much a matter of running strings on the mediainit binary, looking for
a getopt()-style string to see what command-line arguments it was
being used to parse, and trying stuff to see what happened. I think I
had the 7942/7946 service manual handy too and it had some things that
suggested appropriate responses to some of mediainit's prompts.
No idea whether this works with Integral PCs, or with SS/80 or Amigo
drives.
-Frank McConnell