13 Mar
2005
13 Mar
'05
11:11 a.m.
Bob Shannon wrote:
I've used (or attempted to use) ATA ZIP 100 meg
disks on my HP 1000
ATA disk controller (built on an 8052 platform).
ATA ZIP drives are fairly rare; they only made them for about 18 months.
The vast majority of IDE ZIP drives are ATAPI instead. ATAPI is
essentially SCSI commands passed over an IDE transport; that's what
IDE CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and writers, and tape drives use.
ATA disks do indeed alter sector zero, in two
different ways based on how
the 'Drive A:" jumper is set.
I haven't seen that behavior on the ATAPI ZIP drives. I did see it on
a few older ATA hard drives. I haven't seen it on recent ATA hard drives.
You can find some references to this on the web
in discussions of Linux drivers for these drives.
I must not be Googling the right keywords (e.g. linux ata driver write
sector 0), as I can't find anything.
By the way, when I wrote:
I've used "IDE" (ATAPI) ZIP drives
extensively on PDP-11 systems
that was an oversimplifiation. The ZIP drive on the real PDP-11 is
a SCSI ZIP, but there's an ATAPI ZIP in one of my Linux boxes running
a PDP-11 simulator. The simulator is used to run the same OS as the
real PDP-11, booted from the ZIP. I also 'dd' RT11 disk images to and
from the ATAPI ZIP. It has never corrupted the first
block.
Eric