How to install a MFM drive on a 3B2

[Gregory Gulik]

By popular demand, I'm posting a summary of what I did
to make a Maxtor 1140 work on a 3B2/300.

(Anybody working on a FAQ for the 3B2??  These instructions
 SHOULD work for just about any MFM hard drive)

[Before starting, make sure you have the 3B2 Computer   ]
[Maintenance Manual.  This manual includes the famous   ]
[idtools diskette which contains the utilities to format]
[an MFM hard drive and run various diagnostics.  I don't]
[know what number to call, but the code is 305-395      ]

I wanted to install this drive in my XM replacing the
30 MB CDC that was there before.  It fit in the slot
just fine.

To select this drive as Drive 1, move the jumper on the
row of six pins over 1.  Also, this drive did not have a
terminator, so I took the one off the CDC I removed and
stuck it in the socket near the back of the drive.  I
popped it in the computer, powered it on, no smoke rose
from the box, and I rejoiced.

The next problem I ran across is not having any documentation
having bought the drive used.  According to replies I received
from my posting to the net, the drive is listed as having
918 cylinders, 15 heads (tracks per cylinder), 18 sectors
per track, 512 bytes per track.  The drive ID is 11.

The interesting "feature" of this drive (maybe others) is
that it is possible to format it to 1224 cyclinders.  The
3B2 however has a limit of 1024 cyclinders.  I tried that
number and had absolutely no problems formatting.  Also,
somebody suggested I verify it a couple times.  So, I
verified the format 3 times, with no errors popping up.

Then, I rebooted my system.  It automatically found the
new drive, and it of course complained about the VTOC
being bad.  Something I forgot to do was remove my old
hard drive from the fstab file.  I did that by using
the sysadm command under the hard disk menu to remove
a hard drive.  I then rebooted the system, and it looked
ok.  Then, I proceeded to partition the hard drive using
the partition option under sysadm.

Unfortunately, sysadm does not provide enough control
over the partitioning, so I decided to use the mkfs command
so I could allocated more inodes since I was going to
use this drive for a news spool.  I then went through
the /etc/fstab file to make sure everything was going
to be mounted properly and that's it!


I'd like to once again thank everyone who came to my
aid and gave me pointers on how to do this.

Questions I still have:

1) Is there a way to accurately test the data transfer
   rate on a disk attached to the 3B2?  I wanted to
   try different gaps, but I had to way of knowing which
   is best.

2) Has anyone done this using an XDC?  Is the process
   any different?

3) Where can I get more terminators?

-- 
Gregory A. Gulik                                        Call Gagme, a public
       greg at gagme.chi.il.us  ||  gulik at depaul.edu       access UNIX system at
   ||  gulik at motcid.rtsg.mot.com                        (312) 714-8568