| Title: | AMIGA NOTES |
| Notice: | Join us in the *NEW* conference - HYDRA::AMIGA_V2 |
| Moderator: | HYDRA::MOORE |
| Created: | Sat Apr 26 1986 |
| Last Modified: | Wed Feb 05 1992 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 5378 |
| Total number of notes: | 38326 |
I've had several problems come up during my attempt to add a second
disk to my system, and could really use some help and info.
My current configuration:
Amiga 2000 (rev 4.x) w/ XT bridgeboard. A Western Digital XT disk
controller (small board) and a Miniscribe 30meg 3.5" (338 I believe)
drive mounted as a hardcard.
My Goal:
Connect an RD32 (40meg Seagate ST-251) disk as a second unit on that
controller and use it mainly for the Amiga (via JANUS). According to
information I have, this disk has 6 heads and 820 cyls (is this per
head???) and 17 tracks.
Project Description:
1) I correctly cabled everything up and set the jumper on the RD32 to
be unit #2 -- also avoiding the need to "twist" a few of the wires
in the 34 conductor ribbon cable.
2) I first use a Disk Manager utility system by SEAGATE. With this,
I verified the disk's defective list. When I attempted to configure
this as an ST-251, I got an error stating that the controller
must be jumpered to support dis-similar drives (or something like
that). Since I have absolutely no documentation on this controller
(it has several jumpers), and playing with the jumper
variations produce nothing useful, I abandon this utility --
believing that if I get this drive to work I won't be able to
address all 40 meg of it.
FIRST QUESTION: Does anyone have ANY documentation that will help
me understand this controller (or controllers in general)? The
non-unit select jumpers on it were like:
: : ||:::::: <--- two 3 pin jumpers (top
. . two pins on each connected), 8
two pin jumpers (first 2
connected)
= <-- One 2 pin jumper with cap)
| >-- One 2 pin jumper with cap)
SECOND QUESTION: IS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE CONTROLLER WILL LIMIT
HOW MUCH I CAN ADDRESS ON THE DISK?
2) Using DEBUG; I jump to the controller's formatter. I dynamically
configure the disk to be a 820 x 6. I choose interleave 3 because
of popularity and because the SEAGATE utility intended to do this
(the controller's default suggested interleave of 4).
The disk formats - reporting a total of 1023 cyls available.
(The miniscribe had 939 with 4 heads).
3) I create the Amiga partition, use DJMOUNT/DPFORMAT, and the format
fails with a bad block at cyl 178 (this was in the defect table).
All attempts on my part to get the Ami to accept this cyl fail.
A format of an IBM partition over the same area correctly
re-directs the access. I'm forced to create 2 smaller partitions,
omitting this cyl. Further attempts reveal that there is one more
cyl on the disk that the Amiga won't accept -- forcing me to
split the disk into 3 partitions.
WHY COULDN'T I GET THE AMIGA TO CORRECTLY RE-DIRECT THESE CYLS?
IT DOES FOR THE BAD AREAS ON THE MINISCRIBE DISK. WHY IS THE XT
HAPPIER WITH THIS DISK THAN THE AMIGA?
4) After placing software on the disk I find that some gets corrupt.
A real verification comes when I display an IFF picture on the
disk and see 3 half-inch horizontal lines in it. I decide to
reformat the disk at interleave 4 -- the value the controller
suggested as default.
ANYBODY SHED LIGHT ON THIS?
5) I reformat the drive, copy the picture, and look at it. It looks OK.
This is how I left things so far -- I haven't re-loaded all the
software to it to see if all is well now.
Can someone further my education in these matters? Has anyone tried
this?
Thanks, thanks, thanks...
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3554.1 | Still Hopeful | ENOVAX::BARRETT | Of Optical Mice and Men... | Tue Mar 06 1990 15:55 | 50 |
The following reply was a result of some EMAIL communications. I'm
still pretty much in the dark -- especially concerning the controller
jumpers.
Thanks in advance, Keith
>From: NDLVAX::ISTURM 6-MAR-1990 12:47:07.34
>what kind of wd controller you are using a 1002, 1003, 1004 or......
I don't know. I'll look at the board, but if it's not etched in I have no
way of knowing.
>... it looks like , the controller will use drive 0ne's parameters
>also for drive two...
Does this need to be true -- can I change this by jumper settings? I am
using 2 totally different drives.
>if you use debug and you set
>tracks heads wrpreomp readprecomp eccbits steprate
> 820 6 820 820 11 5
>is it the one you use? Or do you use
> 820 6 410 410 11 5
I only specified the 820 x 6 values and left the rest blank. What should
I use? The SEAGATE disk maintenance program recommended precomp values of
65535, but this is too large for the format program to accept. And why
DOES the maintenance program report that I must change the configuration
jumpers because the drives are different?
>and on point 3 , if i read you use dpformat somewhat of your sw must be old..
>to old..
I have the new JANUS already -- but haven't installed it yet. It shouldn't
make a difference to my problem as far as I know. The Amiga FORMAT (when I
get it to run) program fails on the same cyl number. Besides -- why
does the Dpformat program correctly handle a bad spot on the
Miniscribe, but not the RD32? Tends to say I'm doing something wrong.
| |||||
| 3554.2 | Here's more info -- still need help | ENOVAX::BARRETT | Of Optical Mice and Men... | Wed Mar 07 1990 08:32 | 18 |
The Controller is a Western Digital 1002-27x. Does anyone have
documentation on this? How about jumper layouts? How do I tell it
to allow dis-similar drives?
I tried the debug formatter suggestion values in the previous reply
for a dynamic definition -- didn't make any difference; the amiga
format still failed to redirect the bad sector.
I played around some more and discovered that the reason for the large
lines across the IFF file and other data coruption was because I had
the mountlist entry defined for 4 heads instead of 6. It had nothing to
do with interleave.
I'm stlll at a loss for understanding why I must divide the RD32 into 3
pieces because the Amiga formatter dies on 2 particular sectors.
Thanks in advance
| |||||
| 3554.3 | Getting closer | ENOVAX::BARRETT | Of Optical Mice and Men... | Wed Mar 07 1990 17:29 | 18 |
I love this ENET!!! The 1002-27x controller documentation is on-line; I
found it through the IBM-PC notesfile. Now those jumpers aren't a mystery
:-). In fact, it looks like ALL the Western Digital stuff is there.
Still leaves the question about why the Amiga wouldn't format across
those 2 bad spots. I'll finish the installation up tonight (since I
think it'll at least work with the 3 partition definitions). If I
discover anything I'll post it here.
QUESTION:
Does anyone know the true number of heads and transfer rate of the
RD32 (ST-251)?? I seem to have conflicting documentation.
Thanks!!
| |||||
| 3554.4 | WJG::GUINEAU | Wed Mar 07 1990 17:23 | 5 | ||
RD32 has 6 heads (0-5) and 820 cylinders (0-819). Pack as many sectors as you can! (16-18 MFM, maybe more for RLL...) John | |||||
| 3554.5 | Only Partial Success | ENOVAX::BARRETT | Of Optical Mice and Men... | Mon Mar 12 1990 15:57 | 21 |
Everything I tried produced situations that caused an eventual R/W error
on the Amiga side -- this includes controller jumper changes and mountlist
modifications. Only one thing produced reliable results::
I formatted the disk (using DEBUG) the same as the Miniscribe unit
#1 (30 meg x 4 heads) by accepting default answers and keeping the mountlist
entry the same for both drives. So even though the ST drive is 40meg x 6 heads,
producing 1023 cyls -- I ended up using only 4 heads/30meg/939 cyls. The
result being that I can't reference 8 meg of that drive.
I received documentation from Western Digital and now have all the
jumper descriptions. I see that the Sn jumpers should allow 2 drives to
be configured differently, but I'm not sure what the settings should be and
I'm not energetic about opening my system again.
Any disk guru's out there? What should my jumpers be?
kgb
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