>The Western Digital ESDI controller in my 15-year-old Dell System 310 had
>a BIOS setup tool--one typed 'g c800:5' or some sort of arcade game
>nonsense in DEBUG.COM and this CLI popped up.  Among other things, one
>could set fictitious geometries for the drive.  It was sort of like making
>a role-playing character:  you kept hitting <SPACE> and it would make up
>random geometries for you, followed by a question mark.

my old 486 (arrived late '92) originally came with a 200meg drive.
the bios (amibios '91) has this cute full screen thing (sans mouse
support :) where i can pick the type of drive from a list of 47 types
(complete with default values for heads/sectors/tracks).  46,
actually, type 47 just means "user-defined".  the two five gig disks
in there now work just fine with the values i read straight off the
label on the drive.

but i do remember the "g c800:5" nonsense.  there was another address
(i can't recall what) which would just jump straight to a low level
format routine on the controller card or something.  it's a good way
to waste a lot of time and a few filesystems.  :)

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