Hi Ethan
Ethan Dicks wrote:
I have never tried an MFM drive on a machine newer
than about a 386. No
idea if the Pentium-II chipset or its BIOS could be adding to your troubles
or not.
I knew I should never have thrown out my really old 286 :-)
So you are saying that this drive wasn't
originally used with this
controller?
Correct. It was from an RM Nimbus AX/2, long dead now unfortunately. I may
get lucky and be able to get some hardware specs from RM, although I don't rate
my chances.
If that's the case, then you need to ensure that
the drive
is formatted for an ST11R. Even if the drive happens to be rated for MFM
vs RLL (an ST-255 vs ST-238R, say), the controller will _try_ to format
the drive. You just might have problems with completing the format with
few enough errored sectors or with long-term use. The controller doesn't
know anything about the drive that you don't tell it during formatting
(well... if you tell it that you have 8 heads, it *will* notice that there
are only, say, 6... but not the other way around).
Gotcha. There is data on the drive already, that's the reason I want to try to
read what's on the disk. Even if I pull off a 60Mb binary image and have to do
something else to extract the data - that's fine. It's really a one-off
operation since I believe there's still a copy of the ancient RM Net 3.1
software on the disk.
I don't have access to the 'net at the moment
(for another 12 hours), so I
can't look up the ST11R, but if you find docs, there should be formatting
instructions. From memory, a common way to do it was to jump into DEBUG
and call the formatter in ROM with something like 'G C800:5'.
That brings back the memories. Yes, G=C800:5 invokes the low-level format
routine on the card. The manual with the ST11R describes this in brief.
Peter
--
Peter Hicks | e: my.name at poggs.co.uk | g: 0xE7C839F4 | w:
www.poggs.com
A: Because it destroys the flow of the conversation
Q: Why is top-posting bad?