31 Jul
2012
31 Jul
'12
11:13 p.m.
Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
Is it possible to do some kind of "low
level" format (whatever that
means) using an rk05? /P
They're hard-sectored. Every time you write to a sector it does a
low-level format of the sector. Anything that will write to all the
sectors of the pack will effectively format it.
What you can't do that easily is change a 12-sector pack (e.g., for
PDP-11) into a 16-sector pack (e.g., for PDP-8), or any other such
sectoring changes. The sector marks are physical slots in the hub
ridge. Some of us have speculated that a person could contrive a
circuit with a PLL to fake the sector marks electronically, and ignore
the physical ones, but I haven't heard of it actually being done.