Formatting and verifying MFM hard disks

From: Gene Buckle <geneb_at_deltasoft.com>
Date: Thu Nov 27 23:31:43 2003

c800:5

g.


On Thu, 27 Nov 2003, Curt Vendel wrote:

> 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 - 23:31:43 GMT