8 Jan
2021
8 Jan
'21
5:57 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 6:17 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
Yes, but also to hide bad blocks. So the difference
between a raw sector
dump and a SIMH container file is, minimally, the spare sectors. What that
looks like depends on the format; I have no idea what MSCP controllers did.
MSCP controllers do the bad block mapping, so AFAIK the disk _always_ looks
to the host like a linear array 0..n-1 of 512-byte blocks.
When accessing an MSCP disk, the host should not, unless running special
diagnostics, be able to distinguish what kind of disk is in use, aside from
that it has a particular block count.