1024 cylinder limit for MFM drives?

[Martin J. Schedlbauer]

In article <276472BB.15476 at ics.uci.edu> baxter at zola.ics.uci.edu (Ira Baxter) writes:
>I have an MFM Maxtor 2190 drive with 1224 cylinders.  I naturaly want to
>use all 1224 cylinders.   I am (technically cheating, but it works
>reliably) using an RLL WD1006SRV2 controller, and set the drive type
>to 1, and the cylinder count to 1224.  The ISC ADDHARDDISK script
>notices the 1224 cylinders, and truncates it back to 1024 with
>some cryptic remark about BIOS limitations.
>
>Is there no way around this?  How do ESDI, SCSI drives handle this?
>[I assume the "BIOS" limitations for such drives isn't present].
>
>--
>Ira Baxter

BIOS can't handle more than 1024 cylinders. You'll need a controller
that does sector translation. This is what is typically done for ESDI
drives, as they still have the same limitations. ESDI or ST506/MFM/RLL
makes no difference to BIOS.

	...Martin



Martin Schedlbauer				(mschedlb at ulowell.edu)
Institute for Visualization and Perception Research
Department of Computer Science
University of Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854		(Tel: (508) 934-3612)