Tim Shoppa Personal Note: FW: Pertec Interface Fun (Was: RE: HP 9 7548D Hard Drives)

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Tue Jul 11 08:05:55 2000

Tim-

Thanks for peace-of-mind re the Pertec.

I was hoping to hear back from you about mode-page editing...
if you've got a pointer to a good resource on the subject,
no need for you to play teacher to my student...

regards,
-doug quebbeman

P.S. Tim- is there a way for me to send mail directly to
you? The stuff I'm sending to CLASSICCMP_at_trailing-edge.com
is going un-answered.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Douglas Quebbeman
> Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2000 8:48 AM
> To: 'CLASSICCMP_at_trailing-edge.com'
> Subject: RE: HP 97548D Hard Drives
>
>
> > >Subj: HP 97548D Hard Drives
> > >I'm looking for a small number (two or three) of these drives;
> > >they're 5 1/4 inch full-height differential SCSI drives; they
> > >tend to be found in Sun boxen.
> > >
> > >Anybody have any they'd be willing to part with via sale/trade?
> >
> > Do you need these exact HP drives? If it's a capacity issue, there's
> > a very valuable technique called "mode page editing" that will let
> > you adjust drive capacities downward so that you can use large-capacity
> > recent-manufacture SCSI drives in place of older low-capacity SCSI
> > drives. It's a very valuable technique when the hardware or OS don't
> > support large-capacity drives, a very common situation with
> > older hardware.
>
> Tell me more... I've actually been trying to do exactly that, substituting
> a Seagate 11200ND, but the unit I'm trying may have a badspot in one of
> the low sectors.
>
> Additionally, I need a sector size of 2080 bytes; that's for a 2048-byte
> Primos record plus 32 bytes of system overhead. The controller claims
> to be able to do this by combining 5 sectors of the usual 512-bytes each
> into each Primos sector. This is using a 1st Solutions 7110DX controller.
>
> The controller is able to do low-level formatting; you set the # of heads
> and the # of sectors-per-track on DIP switches; then you set one switch on
> (FMT EN) and issue a Primos command to add the drive; the controller than
> initiates the format. I get an error code on a set of LEDs on the
controller
> pretty quickly, and it corresponds to one I see Primos issue sometimes.
>
> So my failure to get this to work currently, may be due to a bad drive.
> I've got another 11200ND on the way, so I can compare results.
>
> -doug q
>
Received on Tue Jul 11 2000 - 08:05:55 BST