Is there a magic word to format a 8" Altos hard disk?

[Geoff Reed]

Quoting Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>:

> Picked up an Altos 8600 that I bought on eBay yesterday, amazingly the
> Xenix actually
> came up, but the drive failed as I was tarring off the file system. I
> had another Quantum
> 2040, put it in, tried to run the formatter, but it says to call Altos,
> asks for a confirmation
> but just returns to the menu if you type 'y' 'Y' or 'Yes' so I'm
> assuming there is a magic
> word you have to enter.
> 
> This is the same controller that the Z80 system uses (8000-14) so I'm
> guessing someone must
> have run into this before. I'm going to paw through the diagnostic
> binary to see if there is
> something that looks magical.
> 
> Sound familiar?
> 
> 

sotla iirc