On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Douglas Meade wrote:

> ST-251 (RD32), and a Maxtor XT2190 (RD54) that the previous owner
> said had come out of a PC.  I also formatted a Mitsubishi MR535
> (977,5,17->42 Mb), but it required some trials.  I needed to keep
> cutting down the LBNs until all phases of the format worked.  My 
> usable space when I brought it up on the MicroVax 3500 was 40 Mb.
> (Now I'm sorry I threw away that 80 Mb MFM drive from my old PC.)

Also ST225, ST412, Micropolus 1325, Quantum D540 (30mb RD54), and many
other drives with similar size or CHS sizes. 

> However, be forewarned: I also had three utter failures.  I subjected a 
> perfectly good (worked with NetBSD!@) RD54 to this procedure, it went 
> through the formatting stage just fine, and then ground noisly away 
> in the "ChkPass" phase, until it woke the baby, and I had to halt.
> I tried a second time the next day.  Same result (except the baby was on
> a stroll.)  The other 2 failures were another ST-225 and ST-251 I had
> astutely purchased on E-bay.  They also got to the ChkPass phase, 
> issued several dots to the terminal, and then gave up.  

You used the wrong constants.

> Now, my question is: If the Vaxstation 2000 thinks it knows the drive
> parameters (i.e., RD54, RD31, RD32), it doesn't go through that
> complicated dialog with you.  The bad part is, then you also have no
> control over these parameters.  I had read somewhere that often the reason
> for failing in the ChkPass phase was that the RBNsize (replacement
> blocks) needed to be set

Yep.

> Of course this is no emergency.  I've a hoard of RD54s, and much larger
> and more boring disks to play with.  But I particularly miss that one.

My solution is xxdp on PDP11.

Allison