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From: kdunn@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU (Kevin Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: SCSI & RLL:  compatible?
Message-ID: <1420@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU>
Date: 23 Feb 91 03:53:22 GMT
References: <7yy0w2w163w@brainiac.raidernet.com> <26907@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU>
Reply-To: kdunn@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU (Kevin Dunn)
Organization: CSEE Dept. Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA
Lines: 24

>In article <7yy0w2w163w@brainiac.raidernet.com> sophist@brainiac.raidernet.com (Phillip McReynolds) writes:
>>Is it possible to have both an RLL drive+controller & a SCSI
>>drive+controller inhabiting the same machine?  If it *is* possible, are
>>there any problems which might make such a scheme either troublesome or
>>unreliable?

    I would advise against it.  I just spent the last month in that situation.
  I was running a 65meg RLL drive.  (The drive is actually a 42meg Miniscribe
3650 MFM that was formatted RLL by the company I bought the computer from.
  Cheapwads!)
    Anyway, I bought an 85meg SCSI (ST 296, I think) and an ST01 controller.
  About half of the time, both worked. The other half of the time, one or
both of the drives wouldn't work AT ALL.  It was completely random.  A disk
crash made me do a low-level format on the 65meg RLL, and from then on it
would only Low level format to 42 megs, no matter what I tried.  Also,
strangely enough,  about 45% of the time, the drive would not boot (I tried
both the SCSI and RLL as boot drives) from a coldboot:  A warm boot, however,
worked fine!  Weird!
    I tested each drive alone in the computer, and both worked 100% correctly.
  Something in the interaction was fouling things up, but, like I said, only
randomly.
     This has been my experience with a SCSI/RLL duo.  I hope you have better
luck.  I too, before I started, was assure by Segate and Miniscribe and various
dealers that there would be no problem....