Acorn Econet Fileserver - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

22 Nov 2005

On Nov 22 2005, 12:33, Jules Richardson wrote:

...
  Of course with ST506/412 you're probably OK - the
Adaptec board probably
...
  supports various sector sizes 
Yes, normally 256 or 512 bytes/sector.

...
  But with SCSI straight to the host adapter it'll
be somewhat different and the
...
  drive needs to support whatever the initiator
requests, which I expect is 256
...
  bytes/sector. 
Yes.  The original drives were all Rodime drives -- at least all the
ones I saw were -- and they did support 256 byte sectors.

...
  Pete, were there two releases of the format utility -
one for ST-type disks
...
  and one for SCSI? 
Probably but I don't remember formatting a SCSI disk.  Actually, perhps
I did.  The Filestore utilities disks contain a version of AForm and
presumably that's what it's for.

...
  Certainly prior to formatting an ST-type disk with the
OMTI board you need to
...
  issue an 0xC2 "assign disk parameters"
command to tell the board what it's
...
  connected to; I can't imagine this is different
with the Adaptec 
It uses a Mode Select command.

...
  >> making a teledisk image; that *might* work. 
They're double-density,
...
  >> 256 bytes/sector, 16 sectors/track.
 >
 > Should be possible, but not a lot of use to me as I don;t haev Teledisk
...
  > (and don't intend to try to write soemthing
to handle its images). I
...
  > might have a go at writing programs to handle
Imagedisk stuff though.
...

 True, Imagedisk is probably a more viable format these days (hat off to Dave
...
  D). 
Although Teledisk is available in many places on the net, and lots of
disk images exist as TD0 files.  It's still the standard for CP/M and
DOS systems, for example, and it's a small program so an easy download.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York