Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!rutgers!ucsd!usc!henry.jpl.nasa.gov!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!mahendo!wlbr!mickey.imsd.contel.com!steve
From: steve@mickey.imsd.contel.com (Steve Childress)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Hard Disk Driver Help Wanted
Message-ID: <40676@wlbr.IMSD.CONTEL.COM>
Date: 16 Nov 89 05:00:16 GMT
Sender: news@wlbr.IMSD.CONTEL.COM
Reply-To: steve@mickey.imsd.contel.com (Steve Childress)
Organization: Contel Federal Systems -- Westlake Village, CA
Lines: 29

Need help with Amiga DOS Disk Driver ....

In 1986, I wrote a driver for a Western Digital controller for the ST506
style disk drives using CBM's "mydevice.asm" as a model. Mucho hours
getting my driver to work. It has worked fine for all this time, until...

Along comes 1.3.

When I user 1.3's FORMAT for FFS, I note that it calls the driver to 
format each track, then reads that track. The 1.1 and 1.2 formatters
did that too. However, when that "verify" CMD_READ yields an error
due to a flawed sector, my driver returns an error, as usual. The
formatter then aborts, saying "BAD DISK, TRY ANOTHER"!!!

Am I missing something? Isn't the formatter supposed to recover from
these read errors by marking that block as USED in the sector allocation
map, or some such strategy? (It doesn't seem to matter WHICH sector is bad.)
 

Do I *HAVE* to have a DISK PREP program which does a low level format
prior to running CBM's FORMAT program? I didn't in 1.1 and 1.2.

I I have to write a prep program, how is it supposed to work? I cannot
find any info on this in the 1.3 autodocs or includes.

thanks.


steve childress          818/706-5247      steve@mickey.imsd.contel.com