Multibus ST-506/QIC-02 (was: Re: SGI IRIS 1400 ...)

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Sun Jul 21 07:37:01 2002

At 09:57 PM 7/20/02 -0700, Frank wrote:
>Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>> I once attempted to repair one of HP's HP-IB hard drives used a
>> Vertex drive internally. I THINK it was a V160 but I'm not sure now.
>> I never did find a replacement that would work. IIRC I tried other
>> brand drives but I couldn't LL format the new drive with the normal
>> user stuff from HP so I don't know if the replacement drives were
>> incompatible or ?? or if the replacements failed due to my inability
>> to LL format them.
>
>Part of the problem is that the HP controller in the drive expects to
>see a high-level format on the drive. Back around HP-UX 7.0 I found
>some arguments to mediainit (-GD I think; the finding was done by
>running "strings" on the mediainit executable and looking for a
>getopt(3)-style option parsing string) that got it to tell the drive
>to do a low-level format and write a new high-level format as well.
>Made the disk portion of a 7946 usable again after going "bad" and
>being formatted in a PC for testing.

   The problem was that I was running it off of a HP 9000 Series 200 and only had access to BASIC and Pascal. They have routines for high level formatting a drive but not LL formating. On some drives the high level format command seemed to do the LL format as well and I could replace the internal HD, run format and all for well. But on other drives I couldn't get the high level format to run. I don't remember the error msgs now but it indicated that the drive needed a LL format. I had a whole pile of defective drives that I played around with and IIRC I was able to replace the internal HDs in those that used Seagate drives and reformat them successfully but not the ones that used the Vertex or HP built HDs.

   Joe
Received on Sun Jul 21 2002 - 07:37:01 BST