Troubleshooting ATA Drives..

[Eric Smith]

Bob Shannon wrote:
> I've used (or attempted to use) ATA ZIP 100 meg disks on my HP 1000
> ATA disk controller (built on an 8052 platform).

ATA ZIP drives are fairly rare; they only made them for about 18 months.
The vast majority of IDE ZIP drives are ATAPI instead.  ATAPI is
essentially SCSI commands passed over an IDE transport; that's what
IDE CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and writers, and tape drives use.

> ATA disks do indeed alter sector zero, in two different ways based on how
> the 'Drive A:" jumper is set.

I haven't seen that behavior on the ATAPI ZIP drives.  I did see it on
a few older ATA hard drives.  I haven't seen it on recent ATA hard drives.

> You can find some references to this on the web
> in discussions of Linux drivers for these drives.

I must not be Googling the right keywords (e.g. linux ata driver write
sector 0), as I can't find anything.

By the way, when I wrote:

> I've used "IDE" (ATAPI) ZIP drives extensively on PDP-11 systems

that was an oversimplifiation.  The ZIP drive on the real PDP-11 is
a SCSI ZIP, but there's an ATAPI ZIP in one of my Linux boxes running
a PDP-11 simulator.  The simulator is used to run the same OS as the
real PDP-11, booted from the ZIP.  I also 'dd' RT11 disk images to and
from the ATAPI ZIP.  It has never corrupted the first block.

Eric