Date   : Tue, 13 Jan 2004 01:30:56 GMT
From   : Pete Turnbull <pete@...>
Subject: Re: IDE Interface for BBC

On Jan 12, 21:38, Jules Richardson wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 18:27, Richard Gellman wrote:
> > so I have no idea what commands an ADFS
> > hard-drive formatter uses to format a HD, if such a piece of
software
> > exists (drives come pre-formatted?).
>
> For the Cambridge Workstation machines the HD formatter was on a
> seperate 'utils' floppy. I don't think anyone knows whether it
actually
> shipped with the machines as part of the standard disk set or whether
it
> just leaked out into the wild later on.

No, it came with them.  At least, my two did.

> Standard BBC machines with the Acorn SCSI board may have been the
same
> (the ACW used the same Adaptec boards)

Yes, there's an utilities disk that includes SuperForm (that's the
formatter's name under ADFS, the DFS version is called SuperF).  The
version for the BBC Micro also has various other winchester utilities
such as Backup and Restore (they don't work very well), a verify
program, a sector editor, and some general ADFS utils like CopyFiles
(or CopyF), ExAll, and CatAll.  HForm on the Arc is very similar to
SuperF/SuperForm.  It doesn't use much that's special in the way of
commands, and the most complex part is doing bad block replacement.  I
wrote one for a Xebex SASI card.  The basic idea is to use a mode
select command to set up the drive parameters (SuperF first tries a
Mode Sense to see if it's a previously-formatted disk it can
understand), then use the Track Format command for each track, finally
building a directory structure and copying it to the disk.  IIRC it
then just uses ordinary user-level ADFS commands to copy SuperF itself
to a subdirectory.

-- 
Pete                                           Peter Turnbull
                                               Network Manager
                                               University of York