Date   : Mon, 18 Apr 2005 19:33:53 +0100
From   : "Ken Lowe" <kglowe@...>
Subject: Re: KeyBoard, Winchester Hard Drive

From: "D.G.van der Pol" <danielg@...>
> If anybody had succes with a SCSI drive on a BBC, after reformatting it at 
> 256bytes/sec, I would really like to know its type & make. (the drive of 
> course, not its owner)

I have a Viglen Host Adapter connected to a Fujitsu M2681 240MB (I think) 
SCSI drive. This drive was originally formatted with 512 byte sectors, and I 
converted it to 256 byte sectors. I wrote a program on my beeb (based on the 
format program which came with my original Viglen Winchester) to change my 
Fujitsu drive from 512 byte sectors to 256 byte sectors (block length). I 
found a document on the Fujitsu website (still there after all this time)...

http://www.fujitsu-europe.com/archive/archive/01000009.htm

describing how to change block length from 512 to 256 using MODE SELECT 0x15 
(I'm not sure if this is specific to the Fijitsu drive). It was then 
necessary to issue a FORMAT UNIT 0x04 command using this same program, which 
reformatted with the specified block length. Once the low level format was 
complete, I initiated a high level format to the SCSI disk again. This 
created the Free Space Map (sectors 0 & 1) and root directory (sectors 2 
thru 6) on the HDD, and I now have a 120MB drive (it may still be 240MB - 
I'm not sure if I lost half the space by changing block length from 512 to 
256, but I defined the drive as 120MB in the free space map, to be on the 
safe side). The HDD worked great after that. I think I should still have the 
format programs on my HDD somewhere if anybody is interested. I haven't 
booted it up in a few years though.

Ken.