Date   : Tue, 06 Jul 2004 18:42:45 +0100 (BST)
From   : Pete Turnbull <pete@...>
Subject: Re: Acorn Winchester unit

On Jul 6, 10:50, Richard Gellman wrote:

> I have the SCSI spec at home (its a thrilling docu.zzzz doc.zzz
mezzzz
> ntzzzzzzz *SNORE*) that covers commands for formatting a device and I
> believe it does mention specifics like sector size. Granted, an
> Acorn-supplied utilities probably won't have a clue when a
> 512-byte/sector drive turns up, but you can use OSWORD &72 to pass
SCSI
> commands direct to the drive.

I've got a set of seven text files which are rev.17B of the X3T9.2 SCSI
standard (SCSI-1) REV 17B, December 16, 1985.  This doesn't have the
diagrams, but does include all the tables.

I also have a directory containing a draft standard for X3T9.2 SCSI-2,
Version 10L 1994 (which I believe is the final draft).  This includes a
set of nasty DXF files and the corresponding PostScript files (prettier
and smaller).

If enough people really want to be bored, I can probably put them
online somewhere.

> Someone mentioned "only using the first 10 or 40Mb". I've not used
> Acorn's hard drive formatters yet, so I don't know how they determine
> drive size, but the ADFS format supports quite unfeasibly large hard
> drives (512Gb I believe). If the formatter won't recognise the whole
> drive, there is a manual method (once the disk is in 256-byte/sector
> mode) that can be use to create an ADFS filesystem on the drive:

I think you're out by a factor of 1024.  IIRC, ADFS format on a Beeb
(and early versions for the Archimedes) only support something like
512MB.  I remember Acorn had to change it when larger drives came
along.

-- 
Pete                                           Peter Turnbull
                                               Network Manager
                                               University of York