6386 WGS Questions
~XT6561110~Frank McGee~C23~L25~6326~
fmcgee at cuuxb.ATT.COM
Fri Nov 10 03:37:51 AEST 1989
In article <6358 at cbnewsm.ATT.COM> dab at cbnewsm.ATT.COM (david.a.berk) writes:
>1) I'm contemplating buying a Perstore Hard Disk Controller which is
> supposed to increase my hard disk capacity by a factor of 1.9.
> Does anyone have any advise or experiences using this board with
> AT&T System V.3.2 Unix ? (Perstore informed me that it has been
> tested on Interactive Unix and runs well).
You'll need a Unix disk driver for the Perstore controller; AT&T
doesn't provide this. The exception would be if the controller was
hardware compatible with a Western Digital ST506 or ESDI controller.
Notice my emphasis on hardware compatibility, not software. Since
Unix doesn't use the ROM BIOS, BIOS extensions (ie, a ROM that makes
the controller look like a Western Digital) doesn't buy you anything.
It has to look like a Western Digital without the use of any ROM BIOS
extensions. Also, the AT&T boot floppies won't recognize it since
they don't know about Perstore controllers.
>2) I bought a 60 meg Tape Backup unit from Bell Tech. about a year ago.
> Can the AT&T Tape Backup read from a Intel Tape and vica versa.
If you are running under Unix, the Bell Tech unit should be portable
with AT&T units. Be carefull of media incompatibilities; it's a good
idea to make sure all your drives use the same density. This is
because although a 120/125 MB tape drive can read a 60 MB tape, it
can't write a 60 MB tape. So if you have one machine with a 120 MB
unit and one with a 60 MB unit, you can't transfer data from the 120
MB machine to the 60 MB machine (although you can go the other way).
>3. Can the 6386 read a floppy witten by a 3b2 ?
File systems - no (byte ordering).
cpio archives - yes, if you use the -c (ascii header compatibility
option). The proper device nodes for 3B floppies on 386 unix are
suffixed with "5qt" (for example /dev/dsk/f05qt or /dev/rdsk/f05qt).
Hope this answers your question,
--
Frank McGee, AT&T
Tier 3 Indirect Channel Sales Support
attmail!fmcgee
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