Future Domain SCSI help needed

[John G. DeArmond]

Ok guys, I think I royally screwed up.  This weekend I got in a bind for
disk space on my DOS box so I ran out to the local retailer and bought
a Seagate ST296 and a Future Domain TMC-860 (Yeah, Roy, I know I f*cked
up but I could not find an Adaptec on a Saturday).  What I got was a box
with a disk drive in it, another box with a controller card and some
advertising, and a "Customer Assurance Plan (ha!)".  So I get back
to the office and slap the hardware into a 16 mhz Compaq that already
contains an MFM drive.  I figure that since the adaptor came with no
software, it must have a ROM formatter like the Adaptec.  (apparently)
Wrongo!  No entry points anywhere to be found.

So I grab the old 2 meter radio and call an impromptu hacker net together.
Someone else who has a 860 tells me that I should have a formatter floppy
with the controller.  (Thanks, SoftWarehouse.  You got me again!)
Someone else offers to loan me a copy of Disk Mastro, a product listed on
the FD advertising as a hundred and some odd dollar super formatter/diagnostic.

So I get the disk and guess what?  I can't figure out how to do anything other
than run a diagnostic.  No formatter to be found.  So I shut this machine
down, rip the cable off the Adaptec, hook the Seagate up and fire up
SCSICNTL (Thank you Roy Neese, thank you thank you thank you! :-).
I set up all the stuff that needs to be set from previous experience
with this drive and fire off a format.

Then thinking I have a problem with a hardware conflict in my Compaq,
I take the drive and the FD controller to a plain 'ole 6 mhz Gen-u-wine
IBM AT.  The paridigm of compatibility.  Fdisk and format that sucker and
away we go.  Back to the compaq and it acts like it never saw the 
SCSI drive before in its life.  So I take all the boards out except the
SCSI controller, an 8 bit VGA card and the MFM controller.  Run SETUP and
tell the MFM controller to go to sleep.  Now I can boot off A: and change
to C: but it won't boot by itself.

So I figure I'll look at the partition with fdisk.  It only shows 79 cylinders
allocated out of 700!  Apparently Compaq dos running on the IBM and running
on the compaq don't give the same answer.  So I fdisk and format the 
drive yet again.  Which is what is going on now.  Now I have some questions:

*	What is the proper way to fire off a low level format with the FD 
	controller?  Should I have gotten a diskette?

*	What's the magic regarding making the Compaq happy with the controller
	and drive?  I'd like to leave the MFM drive in there too but that
	does not look good at this point.

* 	Has anyone played with this controller and an ST-02 in the same box?
	Would I be better off telling Softwarehouse to cram it and get an
	ST-02?  Will the performance be that much worse?  I have a real
	problem wasting an Adaptec on DOS.

*	Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

John

-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC  | "The truly ignorant in our society are those people 
Radiation Systems, Inc. | who would throw away the parts of the Constitution 
Atlanta, Ga             | they find inconvenient."  -me   Defend the 2nd
{emory,uunet}!rsiatl!jgd| with the same fervor as you do the 1st.