Problem formatting SCSI drive
bmcc...@vax1.tcd.ie
my A590. After installing it and powering-on, I discovered it had already been
formatted and Workbench installed by the company I purchased it from. Being a
paranoid kind of guy, I ran Prep-HD off my A590 Setup Disk just to make sure it
_was_ properly formatted. Guess what, it didn't work! I got this message:
"This will low-level format your hard disk.
[...]
Are you sure you wish to continue ? y
Error 32 on device open!
Attempting to prep the hard disk failed.
Check your hardware and try again."
Needless to say, my hardware is OK, and after recovering from the initial
shock, I booted HD-Toolbox to run Low-Level Format Drive. It didn't work
either! The drive whirred briefly, a window appeared briefly telling me it was
formatting the drive, then it went away and the Status line at the top of the
screen changed from "Not changed" to "Empty", ie. it thinks the drive formatted
OK, but of course on re-boot everything was still there.
I have just tried running both these programs again, with no luck. And yes,
HD-Toolbox knows it's a new kind of drive... My system configuration is A500
with 1Mb of chip RAM and 2Mb of fast RAM. I tried Prep-HD with no other
programs running, ie. booting directly off my A590 Setup Disk. Any ideas? It's
no great loss that I can't reformat the whole thing, but I'm just curious as to
what's going wrong!
Barry.
bmcc...@vax1.tcd.ie
Klaus Burkert
[...]
>Needless to say, my hardware is OK, and after recovering from the initial
>shock, I booted HD-Toolbox to run Low-Level Format Drive. It didn't work
>either! The drive whirred briefly, a window appeared briefly telling me it was
>formatting the drive, then it went away and the Status line at the top of the
>screen changed from "Not changed" to "Empty", ie. it thinks the drive formatted
>OK, but of course on re-boot everything was still there.
>what's going wrong!
nothing! :-)
I was surprised the first time I tried to format my LPS52 and 105 too, I got
the same results from Faaastprep as you from HDToolbox.
Then I took a deep look into the Quantum-manuals and there was written that the
HDs will refuse to low-level-format, because they were formatted at factory for
optimum performance.
Quantum uses a special head/cylinder skewing (sort of interleave) to minimize
the required time for resynchronisation.
E.g. they've measured the time needed for stepping to the next cylinder and
figured out, how many sectors have passed by in that time, and 'rotated' the
tracks against each other for the determined amount of blocks.
In combination with the 64KB cache on the HD you can read consecutive blocks
without loosing performance for track-switching or similar...
And because Joe Customer cannot restore such a special format, the
format-command is inhibited.
Ciao, Klaus.
PS: I have nothing to do with Quamtum, only a pleased customer...
-----------------------------------------------------------
Klaus Burkert email: burk...@kirk.fmi.uni-passau.de
Brandweg 11 voice: +49-851/83993
D-W-8390 Passau / Federal Republic of Germany
Randell Jesup
In article <1991Jul26...@vax1.tcd.ie> bmcc...@vax1.tcd.ie writes:
>I recently bought a Quantum LP52S SCSI hard drive to replace the old XT one in
>I ran Prep-HD off my A590 Setup Disk just to make sure it
>_was_ properly formatted. Guess what, it didn't work! I got this message:
>
>"This will low-level format your hard disk.
> [...]
> Are you sure you wish to continue ? y
> Error 32 on device open!
This is because PrepHD assumes what address the drive is at (or
more likely for the A590 it assumes it should prep an XT drive).
>Needless to say, my hardware is OK, and after recovering from the initial
>shock, I booted HD-Toolbox to run Low-Level Format Drive. It didn't work
>either! The drive whirred briefly, a window appeared briefly telling me it was
>formatting the drive, then it went away and the Status line at the top of the
>screen changed from "Not changed" to "Empty", ie. it thinks the drive formatted
>OK, but of course on re-boot everything was still there.
Quantums never actually do anything when they're told to format, other
than map bad blocks you told it to. They're pre-formatted at the factory.
Works good.
--
Randell Jesup, Jack-of-quite-a-few-trades, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, je...@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com BIX: rjesup
Disclaimer: Nothing I say is anything other than my personal opinion.
Thus I have heard: Never make a technical decision based upon the politics
of the situation. Never make a political decision based upon technical issues.
The only place where these realms meet is in the mind on the unenlightened.
- The Zen of Programming
Craig Lemon
> Quantums never actually do anything when they're told to format, other
>than map bad blocks you told it to. They're pre-formatted at the factory.
>Works good.
>
>--
>Randell Jesup, Jack-of-quite-a-few-trades, Commodore Engineering.
Unless of course you wanted to play with your interleave.
--
Craig Lemon - Kitchener, Ontario. Amiga B2000 UUCPv1.13D.
cle...@lemsys.UUCP lemsys!cle...@xenitec.on.ca | BADGERS? We don't need
xenitec!lemsys!cle...@watmath.waterloo.edu | no steenking BADGERS!
..!uunet!watmath!xenitec!lemsys!clemon | -- Raul, _UHF_
John Lee
>In article <23...@cbmvax.commodore.com> je...@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) writes:
>> Quantums never actually do anything when they're told to format, other
>>than map bad blocks you told it to. They're pre-formatted at the factory.
>>Works good.
>
Why in the world would you ever want to play with the interleave on an
embedded-controller SCSI drive?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well one takes the jobs he can get."
+--------+ John Lee
| HUGHES |
+--------+ ARPAnet: jh...@hac2arpa.hac.com
Hughes Aircraft Company
The above opinions are those of the user and not of those of this machine.
Craig Lemon
>In article <clemo...@lemsys.UUCP> cle...@lemsys.UUCP (Craig Lemon) writes:
>>In article <23...@cbmvax.commodore.com> je...@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) writes:
>>> Quantums never actually do anything when they're told to format, other
>>>than map bad blocks you told it to. They're pre-formatted at the factory.
>>>Works good.
>>
>> Unless of course you wanted to play with your interleave.
>
>Why in the world would you ever want to play with the interleave on an
>embedded-controller SCSI drive?
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As some on the net may recall, I was having mysterious
slow-transfer problems (I have a Quantum Q105S and a Hardframe/2000) that
limited my xfer speed to 111K/s on a totally empty partition and it went
down from there. I couldn't figure out what was wrong and posted several
times over a span of a year. I got help from different people different
times and I got different answers. most were something I already thought
of. I know that the drive/controller system should not need anything but
1:1 interleave but someone said "Interleave the sucker!". I have played
with interleave on my A2088 and I know it makes a BIG difference. Once
during a reformat I thought maybe I'd try it. It wouldn't hurt. I
couldn't change the interleave because I can't low level format.
Anyways, so I don't leave people hanging in suspense... :-)
When I decided that UUCP was important and stable enough to warrant it's
own partition I partitioned the drive ~80/20. Suddenly both partitions
were much faster. ~650K/s The reduced size of the partition couldn't
increase the speed by a factor of 6. Besides, the 20 MB partition is
slower than the 80 (although the 20 MB is on the INSIDE sectors of the
drive). Because both the Hardframe and the Quantum have built-in error
retry you never really see most errors, just a reduced xfer speed. I have
a sneaking premonition that I had a marginal area of the HD (maybe a bit or
two) somewhere VERY important the the DOS. It was never a serious enough
error that it ever passed by the drives error checking but it slowed things
down. Now that I moved the ROOT block and all that crap out of that area
things are flying. That's the only solution I could think of. Any other
suggestions while I'm in my editor? :-)