7 May
2007
7 May
'07
5:37 a.m.
On 07/05/2007 03:05, Charles H. Dickman wrote:
I am looking for the source listings for the RQDX3
disk formatting
utility ZRQC from XXDP. I am wondering if they are part of the
diagnostic micro-fiches. I think there are a couple people on the list
with copies of the fiches.
I've got the fiche, but no way to scan it or print it :-( The listing
is quite long.
I want to try formatting some non-DEC hard drives. A
search of the web
shows that some have been successful in patching the drive description
tables to format a drive with non-standard geometry, but I think getting
the parameters for Bad Block Replacement right is the tough part. Maybe
the formatter sources will help.
I've done that, a long time ago (1991). I can't remember the details,
but I recall I had to understand a whole lot of things in the table that
the formatter uses. Something like 34 entries, not just half a dozen.
Some are easy, of course, like number of heads, cylinders; some are easy
to copy from other entries, like the gap lengths; some aren't hard to
work out, like the "media word" which is an encoded version of the drive
name. It gets a bit more interesting if you try to do the same with the
tables in the RQDX2 ROMs, which I also did. And the RQDX2 ROMs contain
a checksum :-(
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York