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From: lasner@shibuya.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec.micro
Subject: Re: drive
Message-ID: <1991Mar26.081242.19378@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 26 Mar 91 08:12:42 GMT
References: <91081.130032DDH104@psuvm.psu.edu> <1991Mar25.110012.1@vmsa.technion.ac.il>
Sender: Charles Lasner
Reply-To: lasner@shibuya.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Organization: Columbia University
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Just a word of correction:
Disk Manager is a program from Ontrack Systems.  It often is configured to pick
out the parameters for your disk by specifying Seagate model numbers.  There 
are other variations for other people's disks.  To my knowledge, only Seagate
gives it away with the disk drive.  You have to buy separately the disk for
drives such as Miniscribe/maxtor, etc.  The sleeve from Ontrack says the disk
program is *for* Seagate, not *from* Seagate!

Disk manager is a program to neatly do all those nitty-=gritty things you can
do without it.  If your controller has a ROM, chances are it has a built-in low-level
disk formatter in it which you can access at location C800:5 of somesuch using
DEBUG.  There are various formatting programs for AT-stylte controllers where
the main BIOS ROM controls the disk.  If your machine can let you set the 
disk type number as well, you don't need Ontrack at all, probably.  Further,
I find it has demented ideas on how to partition the disk, and that is clearly
a functionm best left to other parts of the system, like FDISK, etc.  I
really don't want a bootable 2 meg partition in front of the rest of my disk.

A word to the wise:
Don't use ontrack prior to version 4.00.  There are many bugs until this recent
release.

cjl