Looking for SMD drives (specific models)

[Jules Richardson]

On 04/12/2015 02:15 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
> On 4/12/15 9:05 AM, Jules Richardson wrote:
>> On 04/12/2015 02:35 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
>>> I have a few other SMD drives (just picked 'em up today, in fact) but
>>> they're newer (~825mb) and the Ridge disc utilities only support a small
>>> subset of drives (they do not support providing custom geometries, because
>>> that would be *too easy*.)
>>
>> Can you "under format" an SMD drive? i.e. if you have a drive with equal
>> or greater cylinders and heads will it automagically work at a lower
>> capacity that's supported by your formatter?
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Jules
>>
>>
>
> The thought had crossed my mind; the problem is that the large drives I
> have have fewer cylinders than the ones in that list -- 700-something vs
> 800+, so the drives format fine up until the last cylinder is reached...

Rats :(  Off-the-wall thought, but would it be possible to go poking around 
in the formatter program with a hex editor? The parameters for the drives 
that are supported may be in a format which you could locate and 
reverse-engineer, and then you could tweak one of the entries to match one 
of your drives. I know nothing about SMD though, so maybe it's much more 
complex than the kind of data that would normally be needed for a 
ST506/412-type drive.

cheers

Jules