22 Jul
1998
22 Jul
'98
6:04 p.m.
On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, PG Manney wrote:
According to my Que" UG & R PCs" the Vertex is a 71.0 meg hdd.
There's
only 4 of them listed, the smallest being mod. V130 at 25.8 megs. I used this
chart to recover 10 megs using Spinright for a 32 Miniscribe hdd that had been
low-l formatted at 20. The sheet says it has 1166 cyls. , 7 heads , 17 sectors
per track , and a Write Precomp of 128.
I have a customer (Yes, Virginia, I have two
customers) who has an Epson
QX-10 running CP/M.
His (external) hard disk is reporting bad sectors; he wishes to switch to an
ST-506/412 Vertex 185, which I think is 20 MB.
I find no data for the Vertex 185, but it should have at least as many heads
and cylinders as the disk replaced. That is, unless the CP/M HD format
program is more flexible than most.
I would like
to test the Vertex 185 under Spinrite (MS-DOS) and expand the
bad track table, if Spinrite discovers more problems.
I have questions --
Will the bad track information carry over under CP/M, and will its format
utility see the MS-DOS info? Otherwise, should we just make a list and enter
it?
I think not. Most CP/M HD format programs that I have run across do not
offer the facility to enter bad block data. After format, run a program
such as FINDBAD.COM, which will identigy bad blocks and mark them as used
in the USER 15 directory.
Is there a low-level format utility in CP/M? Is
it necessary, as under
MS-DOS?
It is all done in a single operation. No separate LL and HL formats.
The entire disk will be filled with sectors full of 0E5H's.
What is the QX-10 controller card going to think
of a different hard drive?
Probably, won't note it.
Will it try to run the new drive as a 10 MB?
As I said, unless it is a more flexible than most HD format program, it
will format the same number of heads and cylinders as the previous HD. Thanks,
Your welcome.
- don
> manney(a)lrbcg.com
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