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From: thompson@PAN.SSEC.HONEYWELL.COM (John Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: re: Dwarf Disk Drives
Message-ID: <9008280107.AA29790@pan.ssec.honeywell.com>
Date: 28 Aug 90 01:07:26 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 31



> I have a couple of Maxtor XT8760E disk drives connected to a DN-3500, and
> have run into a couple of problems:
>    1. INVOL reports that the disks have 650 megabytes of storage available
>       (instead of 697, as expected).
You should only have about 650MB.  Regardless of what HP/Apollo says, you do
not get 155MB, 348MB, nor 697MB of 'formatted capacity' on their disks.  I
believe the discrepancy is in the VTOC and other overhead areas.  On our network,
instead of 155/348/697MB, we see 146/329/659MB, which happens to be 94% of
the stated capacity in each case.  Hmmmm...  methinks Apollo uses about 6% of
the formatted disk.

>    2. Power-on diagnostics fail at the first disk test:
>       Self test failed
>       Test #1
>       Expected 00000000 actual=00000011 addr=01001000 pc=00007B24
If the disks are 3rd party, you may need to run INVOL option 7 (initialize physical 
badspot list).  HP/Apollo does that for you as part of their burn-in/test/setup.

>    3. Mnemonic Debugger commands attempting to access the drive(s) fail,
>       but DEX works perfectly and reports no problems.
Probably same as (2) above -- even if my solution isn't right.

John Thompson (jt)
Honeywell, SSEC
Plymouth, MN  55441
thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com

As ever, my opinions do not necessarily agree with Honeywell's or reality's.
(Honeywell's do not necessarily agree with mine or reality's, either)