Acorn Econet Fileserver

[Pete Turnbull]

On Nov 22 2005, 12:33, Jules Richardson wrote:

> Of course with ST506/412 you're probably OK - the Adaptec board
probably
> supports various sector sizes

Yes, normally 256 or 512 bytes/sector.

> But with SCSI straight to the host adapter it'll be somewhat
different and the
> drive needs to support whatever the initiator requests, which I
expect is 256
> bytes/sector.

Yes.  The original drives were all Rodime drives -- at least all the
ones I saw were -- and they did support 256 byte sectors.

> Pete, were there two releases of the format utility - one for ST-type
disks
> and one for SCSI?

Probably but I don't remember formatting a SCSI disk.  Actually, perhps
I did.  The Filestore utilities disks contain a version of AForm and
presumably that's what it's for.

> Certainly prior to formatting an ST-type disk with the OMTI board you
need to
> issue an 0xC2 "assign disk parameters" command to tell the board what
it's
> connected to; I can't imagine this is different with the Adaptec

It uses a Mode Select command.

> >> making a teledisk image; that *might* work.  They're
double-density,
> >> 256 bytes/sector, 16 sectors/track.
> >
> > Should be possible, but not a lot of use to me as I don;t haev
Teledisk
> > (and don't intend to try to write soemthing to handle its images).
I
> > might have a go at writing programs to handle Imagedisk stuff
though.
>
> True, Imagedisk is probably a more viable format these days (hat off
to Dave
> D).

Although Teledisk is available in many places on the net, and lots of
disk images exist as TD0 files.  It's still the standard for CP/M and
DOS systems, for example, and it's a small program so an easy download.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York