Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mailrus!ames!ncar!tank!eecae!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!chaim From: chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Chaim Dworkin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec.micro Subject: Format Pro-350 disks Keywords: format, Pro-350, disks Message-ID: <14810@netnews.upenn.edu> Date: 28 Sep 89 00:59:22 GMT Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu Reply-To: chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Chaim Dworkin) Organization: University of Pennsylvania Lines: 20 I've been using Pro-350s since around 1983 and swearing at what a stupid computer it is up until the past few months. I recently upgraded to P/OS 3.1 and from reading this newsgroup am gaining a new appreciation of what appears to be a very sluggish computer with a weird OS. I have been told that DEC didn't want it to compete with the PDP11 so they put lots of wait states in the operating system. I don't know if that's true but it looks slow enough to have at least a few thousand wait states to me :^) Anyway, one thing which has always bothered me is that there is no format program which will allow you to take a generic 96tpi disk and initialize it on the Pro. You are locked in to buying RX50s. Over the summer I made an interesting discovery. If you buy a generic 96 tpi diskette and format it in a Rainbow using the FORMAT /i command, it will create a formatted diskette which can then be put into a Pro-350 and initialized. Has anyone tried this? Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something safe or am I liable to find lost data sometime in the future??? Chaim