3b2 disk limit

[Greg A. Woods]

In article <1990May4.154009.10562 at nebulus.UUCP> dennis at nebulus.UUCP (Dennis S. Breckenridge) writes:
> woods at robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) writes:
> > I currently have 2 Maxtor-1140's installed, as 15h x 1024c x 18s x 512b.
> > (Most 1140's will format out to 1024 cylinders, though they are only
> > supposed to go to 918.  Some only go to 900.)
> 
> What the question to Greg is: How many times has robohack been down
> on a Maxtor disk fault? I ping his machine (via uucp) just to get
> a laugh every now and then. :-)

The answer is:  many.... though the failing drive isn't a Maxtor
original, but rather a fabrication by Nortek which looks a lot like a
Maxtor.  :-(   I think its heads are magnetized, though that should be
impossible, since they should be ceramic.  I formatted it on Sat., and
ran "dgn sbd ph=20-21 soak" all night.  It completed ATP with 435
complete passes.  After restoring, it handled a few megabytes of news,
then rather quickly went catatonic, with event the bad block map
becoming inaccessible.

Also, to the rest of you 3B2 users:  DON'T change the sector size.
The firmware only knows about 512b sectors.  This wouldn't be a
problem if the firmware only loaded the first sector of track 0, but
it seems the sanity track seems to be elsewhere, and the disk sanity
check fails instantly.  Now, this may still be possible, but I don't
know enough about the undocumented drive type id's, and such, nor have
I looked to see exactly what is stored in sector 0, track 0.

If you are using a Maxtor, or some other large drive with similar
geometry, you can use drive type id 11.  Filledt and/or prtconf know
this drive type as a "135 Megabyte Drive".
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]    VE3-TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA