Date   : Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:59:08 +0100
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Acorn Winchester formatting...

Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> You could save Superform
> to a DFS disc to get round this problem.

Can ADFS and DFS coexist "at once" in a system? I know the ROMs will happily, 
but can they both be active so that I can copy something from ADFS to DFS (or 
vice-versa)?

> What you really need is an Econet....

:-)

Anyway, got it all sorted out now - I found a copy of AFORM lurking on one of 
the formatted hard disks, so formatted an ADFS floppy, then copied Superform 
and Superform1 across. Took a while to find a floppy that'd format without 
failing verification - in the end I ripped the disk out of the jacket and 
flipped it over ;-) (AFORM doesn't have the option of just formatting the 
second side)

The Tandon hard drive's formatted OK (it didn't have an original defect list 
written on it, but only threw up one error, which isn't bad for a ST412 unit). 
I'll have a look at your (Ian's) 'creating some big files' info pages on the 
web now and just check that I can read/write data properly. *FREE is reporting 
sensible values, though.

Oh, I discovered in the course of all this that the Adaptec bridge in my 
second Acorn Winchester unit seems to have died. :-( It throws out error 7F on 
the beeb side for known-good drives (I assume that's a SCSI sense code; I'll 
have a look at the ACB4000 manual later). The PSU in the unit seems to have 
gone too, so I wonder if it failed 'hot' and took the bridge out in the 
process... bah! Not sure yet if it's nuked the Acorn SCSI adapter in there too 
(but that's a bit easier to fix!).

I haven't had this much fun screwing around with hardware in ages, though :-)