Tim Shoppa Personal Note: FW: Pertec Interface Fun (Was: RE: HP 9 7548D Hard Drives) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

11 Jul 2000

Tim-

Thanks for peace-of-mind re the Pertec.

I was hoping to hear back from you about mode-page editing...
if you've got a pointer to a good resource on the subject,
no need for you to play teacher to my student...

regards,
-doug quebbeman

P.S. Tim-  is there a way for me to send mail directly to
you? The stuff I'm sending to CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com
is going un-answered.

...
  -----Original Message-----
 From: Douglas Quebbeman 
 Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2000 8:48 AM
 To: &#39;CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com&#39;
 Subject: RE: HP 97548D Hard Drives

  Subj:	HP
97548D Hard Drives
I'm looking for a small number (two or three) of these drives;
they're 5 1/4 inch full-height differential SCSI drives; they
tend to be found in Sun boxen.

Anybody have any they'd be willing to part with via sale/trade?  
 Do you need these exact HP drives?  If it's a capacity issue, there's
 a very valuable technique called "mode page editing" that will let
 you adjust drive capacities downward so that you can use large-capacity
 recent-manufacture SCSI drives in place of older low-capacity SCSI
 drives.  It's a very valuable technique when the hardware or OS don't
 support large-capacity drives, a very common situation with 
 older hardware.  
 Tell me more... I've actually been trying to do exactly that, substituting
 a Seagate 11200ND, but the unit I'm trying may have a badspot in one of
 the low sectors.

 Additionally, I need a sector size of 2080 bytes; that's for a 2048-byte
 Primos record plus 32 bytes of system overhead. The controller claims
 to be able to do this by combining 5 sectors of the usual 512-bytes each
 into each Primos sector. This is using a 1st Solutions 7110DX controller.

 The controller is able to do low-level formatting; you set the # of heads
 and the # of sectors-per-track on DIP switches; then you set one switch on
 (FMT EN) and issue a Primos command to add the drive; the controller than
 initiates the format. I get an error code on a set of LEDs on the controller
...
  pretty quickly, and it corresponds to one I see Primos
issue sometimes.

 So my failure to get this to work currently, may be due to a bad drive.
 I've got another 11200ND on the way, so I can compare results.

 -doug q