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From: owenc@qut.edu.au (Chris Owen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
Subject: Re: 386 WGS E Novell COMPSURF prob.
Message-ID: <1991Jan4.152042.22259@qut.edu.au>
Date: 4 Jan 91 20:20:42 GMT
Organization: Queensland University of Technology
Lines: 24

Wayne Fee (feejw@stat.appstate.edu) writes:

>does anyone know how to disable the sector translation on a 6386 E Tower 20mhz
>machine?  The controller is a WD1007a-wah ESDI with a Micropolis 320meg drive. 
>This is the config shipped from att.  The problem I have is that when I try to
>COMPSURF the drive under Novell I get a error message immediately that the
>drive failed to format.  I know the drive has 1221 cyls, 15 heads and 34
>sectors/trk; COMPSURF reports the drive as having something like 853 cyls, 15
>heads and 60 some sectors/trk.  I've had this problem before with ESDI drives
>and NOVELL and got around it by disabling the sector translation. 
>Unfortunately, this wd card is not like the others I have used or have doc for.

The sector translation is done by the controller.  My WAH has 6 jumper blocks
on it.  W14 controls sector translation.  Install the jumper here to disable
it.  We are running 2 of these drives (1558's I assume) in different servers.
One uses translation, the other doesn't.  Doesn't seem to make much difference
provided the BIOS supports the configuration shown to it by the controller.
We didn't use Novell to do the format though.  Western Digital has it's own
format program WDPREP which does this.

Chris Owen                           | c.owen@qut.edu.au
Computer Based Education             | voice +61 7 223 2912
Queensland University of Technology  | FAX   +61 7 229 0874
Brisbane, Australia