Andreas Holz wrote: It's for an XL1200, the last in the line of ivory based machines. My understanding is that the FEP and genera can both format SCSI drives. They won't format ESDI drives (which I have lots of) due to the need for a bad block list. Apparenly someone at symbolics decided long ago that the way to handle bad blocks was use a custom program which makes a special file system and enter all of the bad block #'s by hand. This was something customers never got... I need a unibus ESDI controller so I can use some of the 5 1/4" ESDI drives I have lying around! anyone? -brad

ben franchuk wrote: The problem is that they format the disks with a non-standard block size (remember, lisp machines existed long before PC's) and they don't supply the software to format the ESDI disks. I suppose if I had an ESDI controller on another machine which would allow me to format ESDI disks with arbitrary block sizes I could do it. But I don't know any such beast. I suppose there has to be ISA bus ESDI controller from WD - any know if such a controller will allow one to format a disk with a block size > 512? -brad