Formatting and verifying MFM hard disks

From: Curt Vendel <curt_at_atarimuseum.com>
Date: Thu Nov 27 21:33:43 2003

Well, lets see.... if your on a PC, I think if you type at the DOS prompt
c:\> debug c800 that put you into the MFM controller firmware and you could
perform a low level format of the drive....



Curt


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian Primus" <ian_primus_at_yahoo.com>
To: "General Posts" <cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2003 4:00 PM
Subject: Formatting and verifying MFM hard disks


> As I have been sorting and cleaning over Thanksgiving, I decided that I
> would build up an extra PC clone for the sole purpose of formatting and
> verifying various types of media, such as SCSI, IDE, and MFM hard
> drives and 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 floppies. I originally planned on just
> tossing an MFM card and SCSI card into an older AMD K6-2 233, and
> installing two floppy drives. But, as I got started, I remembered how
> the old MFM drive controllers worked, and how they kinda take over the
> boot process. Also, since MFM drives need to be low level formatted for
> a specific controller before they can be high level formatted, I can't
> really just format them from Linux. I found a Seagate card that has a
> nice boot screen with a drive formatting utility, but it only handles
> eight different Seagate drives. I've got a couple of other old
> controllers, none of which have such a nice utility, and all of which
> prevent me from booting from CDROM (they intervene before the BIOS
> boots from a disk, and when the MFM card can't boot a hard drive, it
> tries floppy drives, but it doesn't see the CDROM, and won't return
> control of the boot process back to the PC's built in controllers)
> Also, in this process, I realized that I can't find my DOS disks! It's
> been a long time since I booted DOS, and an even longer time since I've
> messed with DOS on XT's, so I don't know where the disks are. What I
> think I need is a disk with DOS 3.x and debug. I remember having to use
> debug to invoke the built in formatting program on most hard drive
> controllers.
>
> Anyway, what I really want to do, is have a computer that would have an
> MFM card in it, and be able to work with any MFM drive. I'd also like
> to still be able to boot off an IDE hard drive or a CDROM, since I want
> to install Linux on an IDE drive on the motherboard's controller, and
> use that for high level formatting. I can probably work around that by
> having a Lilo bootdisk, and booting that first, then the system could
> continue booting from an IDE drive. But, if I did this, what is the
> best way to do low level formatting on MFM drives? Is there a way to
> invoke the card's internal formatter from Linux? It's been a while
> since I worked with this stuff, can anyone refresh my memory?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ian Primus
> ian_primus_at_yahoo.com
>
Received on Thu Nov 27 2003 - 21:33:43 GMT