26 Jun
2006
26 Jun
'06
3:22 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 6/26/2006 at 2:01 PM Scott Quinn wrote:
If the same model bridge board with the same ROM is used though, I can't
imagine it'd be a problem. [1]
Formatting a new drive is a little more tricky, but still shouldn't be a
problem providing the drive parameters that were used to format the original
drive are known, and the correct bridge board is used.
Granted that moving drives between bridge boards (or even to the same board
with a different firmware revision) probably will cause various problems, as
it breaks the tight relationship between formatted drive and controller.
[1] You obviously need to know the drive geometry. Sometimes the host machine
stores that at block 0 (and offsets all future disk accesses by 1 block). Some
systems use bridge boards that can hold it in ROM, or NVRAM. The tricky ones
are the ones that hold it in their own NVRAM and get their firmware to issue
the necessary setup command to the bridge board at boot time.
cheers
Jules
If you didn't have to reformat the drive (not
sure how the bridgeboards
worked in this respect), it would allow you to pull data off
of a ST412-interface drive onto a modern one for backup. I have an IRIS
here that the PM2 is nonfunctional, yet I would still like to
see if I can salvage the O/S off the drive.
That's a huge "if", particularly if the ST-412 drive didn't come from
a
"like-controllered" system. Just my own experience talking.