DEC Pro hard drive formatter

[Paul Koning]

I'll give that a try, thanks Chris.

The hardware supports multiple drives just fine (one per controller).  The power supply shuts down with three hard drives, though, the surge current is too high.  I could work around that if I ever needed two.  Two drives is not a problem, and my RSTS code supports this.

	paul

> On Jan 14, 2021, at 1:25 PM, Chris Zach via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> Hm. I remember that POS 2.0 and above would just format the hard disk and go during the install. Likewise I don't know if you can have multiple hard disks in P/OS so that's a pain in the tail.
> 
> Boot from floppies and just init the raw disk.
> 
> C
> 
> 
> On 1/14/2021 11:39 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>> I'm wondering how to do hard drive formatting, which is likely to be needed when working with emulated disks in David Gesswein's MFM emulator.
>> As far as I can tell, RT-11 can do this.  At least I have a source code printout for such a formatter.  But while I can find a hard drive image of RT V5 for Pro, I haven't found any floppy-bootable images.  And I think it's a bit tricky to create one.  I knew, long ago for V2...
>> Any suggestions?  Any alternative sources for a formatter?  I guess I really should consider typing in the core of that formatter and adding it to RSTS.
>> 	paul