On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 9:28 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
Picked up an Altos 8600 that I bought on eBay
yesterday, amazingly the
Xenix actually
came up, but the drive failed as I was tarring off the file system. I had
another Quantum
2040, put it in, tried to run the formatter, but it says to call Altos,
asks for a confirmation
but just returns to the menu if you type 'y' 'Y' or 'Yes' so
I'm assuming
there is a magic
word you have to enter.
This is the same controller that the Z80 system uses (8000-14) so I'm
guessing someone must
have run into this before. I'm going to paw through the diagnostic binary
to see if there is
something that looks magical.
Sound familiar?
When you run the hard drive format command and you're asked "Do you want
to
continue?" rather than say "Y" enter "sotla" This is the secret
response
you need to bypass the format block.
Bill