Joe R. wrote (after Jos Dreesen): At least some CS/80 discs support the CS/80 low-level initialization command. It's generally not clear how to do this, but if you go trawl Google Groups for "mediainit vGD" you may find a transcript of how I got HP-UX 7.05 to low-level format a 7946 disc so long ago that it's on topic. The message doesn't explain how I figured this out, but it was pretty much a matter of running strings on the mediainit binary, looking for a getopt()-style string to see what command-line arguments it was being used to parse, and trying stuff to see what happened. I think I had the 7942/7946 service manual handy too and it had some things that suggested appropriate responses to some of mediainit's prompts. No idea whether this works with Integral PCs, or with SS/80 or Amigo drives. -Frank McConnell

The documentation does specify a "Format" command for CS-80 devices. I have used a bus system analyzer to format a number of drives this way. I don't recall formatting a 9133 but, I would be very suprised if it didn't work the same way. I have a HP9134 sitting here that was formatted last month using the analyzer. The command sequences are very unforgiving so doing it with an analyzer takes a LOT of patience! See yas, SteveRob

I think you've mis-rememnbered. The 9153 (and the 9154, which is the same unit without a floppy) use a special HP drive. It has a 40 pin connector, carrying power and what seems to be 'raw' data (i.e. more like an ST506 interface than IDE or SCSI). I've not figured it out yet -- there are custom chips at both ends of the cable and looking with a logic analyser didn't intentify all the signals -- yet. I beleive (although I am not certain as all I have is the 9154) that the 9153 uses the same floppy drive as the 9114B. That is, the later half-height unit with the single 34 pin power/data connector. There's a switch or link on the controller board of most of these hard disk units to select whether the floppy is installed. If you pull the floppy drive for any reason, yuo should flip this switch/link so that the thing passes the self-test. The 9133H does use an ST225, or at least mine do. But I found that if you stick in any old ST225 (i.e. one without the HP low-level format) then it'll fail the power-on diagnostics and you can't do anything with it. Therefore low-level formatting must have been done in one of 4 ways : 1) An undocumented command, accepted even when the diagnostics failed. 2) A particular set of link/switch settings (which I don't know) 3) A special firmware EPROM 4) Another formatting device that was used to pre-format the drives before they were stuck in the 9133 unit. I have no idea which of these is the case. Yes, the high-level format is possible on all the HP drive units I've come accross. But not the low-leve one. That, alas, is my experience too. -tony

That's interesting. The 9113H uses an ST225 I think (it's certainly a normal ST506 interaced hard disk). If there's a way to replace the drive in that with any old ST225 ripped from a PC or something then I'll be rather happy. I'd also be interested if anyone has worked out what the Ident Sea settings correspond to. -tony

On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Tony Duell wrote: I successfully replaced the ST225 in a 9133 with an ST238 (same drive, but certified for RLL). It was connected to an HP64000 development system, which supported formatting, IIRC (I no longer have the drive).