Date   : Tue, 02 Apr 1991 17:20:35 GMT
From   : att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!nucsrl!tellab5!laidbak!amiganet!austral!rrezaian@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Russell Rezaian)
Subject: Re: Help: Documentation, information, et cetera.

In article <9046@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu (Clarence
Wilkerson) writes:
>Sorry, no experience with Zeus MP/M type stuff.
>However, on the subject of disk drives, any St-506
>innerface drives I've used will cheerfully allow you to
>use them at less than full capacity. So if the number of
>logical heads is less than or equal to number of physical
>head, and same for cylinders, almost any other
>drive should replace the ones you have. For example,
>Seagate ST251 's have 6 heads, and 820?? cylinders, and
>are going new for about $250. Unfortunately, the cheaper
>bargain drives such as ST225 only have four heads and would
>not plug right in. 
>
>If the drive controller is SCSI, then the operating system
>may think it reading a certain track and sector, but actually
>eventually asks for an absolute sector number, so if the
>scsi controller has set the correct parameters the operating
>system would not know what it has physically. 
>
>Poke around under the hood and see what kind of hard disk
>controller is there?
>Clarence
>
> 
I did a little checking, the controller is labeld WD1000 (like how many
othert hard drive controllers...) the cable connecting it to the system is
NOT a standard SCSI, the interface might still use a similar protocol, but
I doubt it.  We do have the pretty common looking large brown cermic chip
at the bottom, but it isn't labeled coherently, there are what looks like a
couple o Western Digital PALs floating around, as well as a few other PALs.
       I have been able to substitute other drives, and that did
work, sort of...  The only problem s that is it painfull to end up using 15
megs of a 40 meg drive...  I would sooner dissassemble the sysgen and
re-engineer the bios than waste that much space...
Thanks for your ideas though, I might end up doing that anyway...
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|  Russell Rezaian             |  amiganet.chi.il.us!austral!rrezaian  |
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