Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!b.gp.cs.cmu.edu!Ralf.Brown@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
From: Ralf.Brown@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Help needed formatting with RLL
Message-ID: <24e02c47@ralf>
Date: 9 Aug 89 13:06:15 GMT
Sender: ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science
Lines: 23
In-Reply-To: <640@holin.ATT.COM>

In article <640@holin.ATT.COM>, doc@holin.ATT.COM (David Mundhenk) wrote:
}One point of curiosity - I looked at my father-in-law's ST238 
}with Norton Utilities. It said it has 17 sectors per track, and
}4 heads just like and ST225, but 900+ cylinders for 30MB capacity.
}I thought RLL made more sectors per track, not more cylinders...
}Am I totally confused here? Or is Norton?

The controller's BIOS is lying in an attempt to improve compatibility (there
are programs that will barf on other than 17 sectors per track).  When told
to access the disk, the BIOS will compute the true cylinder/head/sector
address from the given values.

Note that nondestructive reformatter will probably break when faced with such
a situation, since they will be trying to reformat "tracks" that are actually
on two physical tracks in most cases....
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