Acorn Econet Fileserver

[Jules Richardson]

Pete Turnbull wrote:
> On Nov 20 2005, 18:29, Tony Duell wrote:
>> Is there any restriction on the hard disk size? 
> 
> There will be some limit, but I'm not sure what it is.  More than 20MB,
> for sure.  Might be 500MB, maybe less.  I know that stacking filestores
> use the same code, and I know that although the largest ones sold and
> supported by Acorn were 60MB, they had bigger in-house.

They didn't just stack them (as was intended by design)? Not practical for the 
ST506 units I suppose is it'd only support two drives, but the SCSI ones I 
think could be piled up to the limit of the SCSI bus - ie. 6 devices. 360MB 
would not be at all bad for the time, considering the nature of the data which 
tended to be stored on them.

>> Accordign to the manual, there is a utility disk for this unit, and
> maybe
>> a service disk too (it's not clear whether this is one disk or two).
> The
>> former contained the program to format the winchester, and is
> therefore
>> somewhat importent.
> 
> Yes, two 3.5" floppies.  And I just happen to have a set :-)  One is
> for use with a Master 128 called "M128-FSUTILS"

Hmm, if you can ever do a raw image dump of that, shout! :-)

I've got a level-3 server hard disk which I can't get in to as I don't know 
any passwords; I think I can get around this with the utils disk, except that 
it isn't online anywhere...

The drive in question is another one used internally by Acorn, so it's 
possible that it has some interesting stuff on it. I can boot it via a Master 
Turbo and Winchester unit hooked up to a simple Econet, I just then can't do a 
lot apart from shut it down again (because as you say the filesystem is 
something other than ADFS). It may have been emptied of user data for all I 
know, but I'd like to check *before* the disk keels over :-)

[Econet test box]
>> Amazingly I have this test box, I don't have the software.
> 
> Ditto!  The test box pre-dates the Master series, though.  It was
> around when Beebs were.

Is that this critter? :

http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/ETB.html

cheers

Jules