On Sun, 8 Mar 1998, Diana wrote:
> levelled one.  Anyone remember "g=c800:5" at the DOS debug prompt? ;-)

Yeah, that was fairly nifty :) (If that does what I think it does...
starts up a low level format utility that was in ROM?)

FWIW, NetBSD will work with some ancient drives... my dad just upgraded
his machine, so I inherited his old one... I think the drive in it, a
Microscience 7100-00, is one of those XT/IDE drives you mentioned? It
had been hooked up to some sort of MFM/RLL/something controller card
(and many years ago, I remember changing a jumper on the card and doing
g=c800:5 to change the sector translation... used to claim to have
17sectors/track, but it really has 35). Anyways, I did a web search for
some info on the drive, and found out that it'd work as an IDE drive
too. So after jumpering my main hard drive to be "master, with an
ancient slave drive" and the microscience to slave, things seems to be
working fine:

wd1 at wdc0 drive 1: <MICROSCIENCE>
wd1: 102MB, 855 cyl, 7 head, 35 sec, 512 bytes/sec
wd1: using 1-sector 16-bit pio transfers, chs addressing
-- 
Name: Dave Huang     |   Mammal, mammal / their names are called /
INet: khym@bga.com   |   they raise a paw / the bat, the cat /
FurryMUCK: Dahan     |   dolphin and dog / koala bear and hog -- TMBG
Dahan: Hani G Y+C 22 Y++ L+++ W- C++ T++ A+ E+ S++ V++ F- Q+++ P+ B+ PA+ PL++