All things ESDI

[Liam Proven]

On 5/4/05, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:

> I think I handled a 600 in a Novell server once.

Oooh! [Envy] ;¬)

>  > It's an Int11 device, just like an ST-506 drive. The BIOS needs
>  > to be configured with the right number of heads, cylinders and
>  > sectors-per-track, tho' picking type 20 or so will usually give you
>  > enough to boot and read the true settings off the drive itself. They
>  > will probably need to be low-level formatted if moving them from
>  > one controller to another. DEBUG and then G=c800:5 is what I dimly
>  > recall for this, tho' in later years I used CheckIt or even SpinRite
>  > to do this.
> 
> I'm inclined to disagree, though I'm hardly the expert.
> 
> Specifically, I recall having trouble setting up several ESDI drives
> in servers.  The fix was to tell the machine BIOS the disk didn't
> exist, then let the ESDI controller BIOS work out geometry.

Oh really? Odd. I recall doing that for SCSI but not for ESDI - I'm
pretty sure I needed to tell the BIOS there was /some/ drive there,
and at least a 20MB to be reasonably sure of getting all of track 0
and the partition table and so on without splitting that track over
several nonexistent cylinders. Mind you, whether my dim recollection
of type 20 being true is anybody's guess, it's so long ago now. This
entire bit could be false memory syndrome. :¬)

-- 
Liam Proven
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