Altos additional drives

[David R. Seaman]

Question: Has anyone played with adding a non-Altos hard disk?

We currently have an Altos 886, Xenix 3.2fs5. The standard
80Mb hard drive is starting to act up. It sounds like the
fan is rubbing on something. It makes very loud, high pitched
grinding sounds (very scary)...but it has been doing this
over the last couple of months. Tightening the rubber shock
mounts will stop the noise for a while.

Anyways, I bought a Maxtor 1140 drive to see if I could use
it in the Altos. Using the formatting utilities that are
hidden in the SDX disk (magic ^F and password for field diagnostics)
I tried to format the drive. All goes well until it questions
about the bytes/sector. The maxtor has 15 heads 32 sectors/track
and 256 bytes/sector. The Altos formatting utility will not allow
a value of 256..only 512 and beyond. If you try and fool it by
saying 16 sectors/track and 512 bytes...it writes a valid driveinfo..
but when xenix creates a filesystem...every second track is a bad
block!

I tried using a DOS machine and a program SpeedStore to format
the drive (did a fine job), but Altos Xenix did not recognise
the driveinfo (typical Altos!).

So the question of the day is...

Can I use a drive with 256 bytes/sector on a Unix/Xenix/Altos system?
(Is it worth my while to try and adb the utility to remove the 256 limit)
Has anyone encountered similar problems?
Does anyone want to buy a 140Mb brand new, only formatted, Maxtor 1140?
							( 1/2 :-) )

Thanks for any info....
						David R. Seaman
---------------------------------------------------------------
Style Us - Text Formatting Professionals
(416) 323-9444 (voice)
sq!style!dave
ddsw1!style!dave