Controller/driver combo... will it work?

[pri=-10 Stuart Lynne]

In article <257 at bby-bc.UUCP> john at bby-bc.UUCP (john) writes:
>> > My question is:  will this work under Mport unix?
>> 
>> Nope. I learned it the hard way, and ended up having to return an
>> RLL drive and controller.  Microport said they don't support RLL and don't
>> have any plans to in the near future.  The drivers count on the
>> hard disk having 17 sectors per cylinder, and the RLL concept uses
>> 26 per.
>
>I don't understand the problem here (I'm not disputing the correctness
>of your claim re microport).  It can't be *that* hard to make the system
>work with 26 sectors/track instead of 17.  My understanding of the RLL
>and ERLL controllers is that from the software's view of the hardware

I'm told by the good people at Bell Tech that they *DO* support RLL
controllers with their (very inexpensive) version of System V/386.

Caveat: Your BIOS ROM's must have a suitable entry for the RLL drive. I.E.
it must say that there the proper number of heads/cylinders/sectors - in
this case 26 sectors. 

The cylinders may not be as important, the diskconfig script does have some
questions about the *actual* number of cylinders on the drive. My impression
is that you can use a ROM entry that has less cylinders specified and
have diskconfig compensate. But you must have the correct number of heads
and sectors in the ROM entry.

N.B. I have not tried this as we havn't got an RLL controller yet (still
waiting for the WD-1006 RA2).

Bell Tech uses this as a selling point, the drives they sell are rated for
RLL. So if you have an RLL controller and good ROM's this is a *very* cost
effective way to increase your storage.

Rumour also has that Interactive supports RLL as well, and I vaguely
remember something about SCO doing something with Xenix /386.


-- 
{ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!Stuart.Lynne Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532