HP9133 user guide...?

[Frank McConnell]

Joe R. wrote (after Jos Dreesen):
>>I hope the 9133 is intelligent enough to format the disk itself
>
>    Most HP drives aren't. I've only found ONE that would. I THINK it was a
> 9153 and it used a ST-225. But it's worth a try. However, most of the HP
> drives use oddball drives that I was never able to find replacements for.
> If you do find a replacement drive, install it and just use the normal
> format utility for your system.  Most HP systems call it "Initialize".
> From what I can tell it usually does the equivelent to  a high level fromat
> (sets up directory, FAT, etc) but not the Low Level fromatting/disk testing
> so it frequently fails with replacement drives.

At least some CS/80 discs support the CS/80 low-level initialization
command.  It's generally not clear how to do this, but if you go trawl
Google Groups for "mediainit vGD" you may find a transcript of how I
got HP-UX 7.05 to low-level format a 7946 disc so long ago that it's
on topic.

The message doesn't explain how I figured this out, but it was pretty
much a matter of running strings on the mediainit binary, looking for
a getopt()-style string to see what command-line arguments it was
being used to parse, and trying stuff to see what happened.  I think I
had the 7942/7946 service manual handy too and it had some things that
suggested appropriate responses to some of mediainit's prompts.

No idea whether this works with Integral PCs, or with SS/80 or Amigo
drives.

-Frank McConnell