non-apple disks

[Kent Sandvik]

In article <1991Jun6.233139.11192 at murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, wrp at biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson) writes:
> 
> 
> 	I have been puzzled by the recent discussion about using non-Apple
> disks with AUX.  I am planning on purchasing a 210 Mbyte Quantum disk
> that will be dedicated to AUX 2.01.  The latter will be purchased on CD-ROM.
> The question: do I need to purchase Silverlining, or something like it?
> The new disk will have nothing but AUX on it (or perhaps a little MacOS
> to boot from?).  Will I be able to run the AUX partitioning utilities
> without installing AUX so that I can run from the new non-Apple disk?
> 
> 	Contrary to several comments about non-Apple disks, many unix
> manufacturers make it easy both to format and partition third-party disks.
> It is my understanding that "formatting" a SCSI-disk is very standard, 
> and usually unnecessary. It seems to be very simple to modify HD-Setup to
> "recognize" non-Apple disks (after a quick look with SCSI-probe). Once
> the disk is recognized, will HD-Setup do whatever necessary, or are there
> additional tables in HD-Setup (in addition to the vendor's product name)
> that must be changed?

It was once easy to modify HD Setup :-) - it's a little bit more awkward 
nowadays. The formatting of SCSI disks are as you say standard. It is the
partitioning side that is the tricky thing. Most modern and good non-Apple
hard disk partitioning programs, such as Silverlining, are capable of
producing good working partition maps that the installation program and A/UX
in general recognizes.

I once thought that SCSI was standard, but the transport side is one issue,
and the partitioning side is a totally another thing, and as in UNIX in general
each vendor has their own ideas of partitioning systems. I remember good old
NCR UNIX partitions, where you could easily generate overlapping partitions, because
the partitioning program wanted to make 512-byte sized partitions and increased
values behind your back... So HD Setup is heaven for me :-), especially compared
with a session with Aries UNIX system partitioning, or Tahoe partitioning...

Kent Sandvik