Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!nuchat!steve From: steve@nuchat.UUCP (Steve Nuchia) Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport Subject: Re: Seagate ST-4096 Question Message-ID: <1031@nuchat.UUCP> Date: 1 Jun 88 23:17:48 GMT References: <1036@bellboy.UUCP> Organization: Public Access - Houston, Tx Lines: 45 From article <1036@bellboy.UUCP>, by hack@bellboy.UUCP (Greg Hackney): > In article <354@gaia.UUCP> cook@gaia.UUCP writes: >>Has anybody out there had any expirience making a Seagate ST-4096 > Steve Nuchia (steve@nuchat) has one on his AT. Well, I used to .... That 4096 is the reason nuchat (my long-suffering 286) was down all last week. I don't know whether an incipient electronic failure was the cause of my seek errors all along or if Microbug's software (dual disk bug) caused the hardware failure, or if maybe there were two different problems all along. Anyway, the 4096 is often involved when people are having the dual-disk problem, but it isn't the only drive the problem has been seen on. I got just over a year of 24-hour multi-neighbor usenet + 2-line BBS use out of it (head moving pretty much continuously more often than not) and there is still some hope of it being repaired for less than the replacement cost. > However, I did low level it with the Seagate DM formatter (which > someone just posted a claim that this is a questionable practice). I missed the claim - using a DOS disk formatter was the only way to make it work - Microbug's won't even come close. You may also need to have a correct entry in your ROMS - they claim to have fixed the problem, but in a quick trial I wasn't able to make my system boot from the 4096 with standard roms. It will work as a second drive without being in the rom, though. The 9-headedness isn't too much of a problem if you use a controller that's prepared for it; I've never had a chance to use anything but the WD1003-WA2. Anyone heard anything about support for RLL? SCSI? How about controllers that fake 17 sectors (remapping) with RLL? Failing that, what about MFM 17-sector drives with >100Mb capacity? (dream on, I know, but I just had to ask :-) steve -- Steve Nuchia | [...] but the machine would probably be allowed no mercy. uunet!nuchat!steve | In other words then, if a machine is expected to be (713) 334 6720 | infallible, it cannot be intelligent. - Alan Turing, 1947