At 09:57 PM 7/20/02 -0700, Frank wrote:
Joe <rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com> wrote:
I once attempted to repair one of HP's
HP-IB hard drives used a
Vertex drive internally. I THINK it was a V160 but I'm not sure now.
I never did find a replacement that would work. IIRC I tried other
brand drives but I couldn't LL format the new drive with the normal
user stuff from HP so I don't know if the replacement drives were
incompatible or ?? or if the replacements failed due to my inability
to LL format them.
Part of the problem is that the HP controller in the drive expects to
see a high-level format on the drive. Back around HP-UX 7.0 I found
some arguments to mediainit (-GD I think; the finding was done by
running "strings" on the mediainit executable and looking for a
getopt(3)-style option parsing string) that got it to tell the drive
to do a low-level format and write a new high-level format as well.
Made the disk portion of a 7946 usable again after going "bad" and
being formatted in a PC for testing.
The problem was that I was running it off of a HP 9000 Series 200 and only had access
to BASIC and Pascal. They have routines for high level formatting a drive but not LL
formating. On some drives the high level format command seemed to do the LL format as well
and I could replace the internal HD, run format and all for well. But on other drives I
couldn't get the high level format to run. I don't remember the error msgs now
but it indicated that the drive needed a LL format. I had a whole pile of defective drives
that I played around with and IIRC I was able to replace the internal HDs in those that
used Seagate drives and reformat them successfully but not the ones that used the Vertex
or HP built HDs.
Joe