Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!ncc!alberta!att-ih!ihnp4!spdcc!eli
From: eli@spdcc.COM (Steve Elias)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: big disks on PC AT clones
Message-ID: <1006@spdcc.COM>
Date: 30 Apr 88 20:00:01 GMT
References: <21346@amdcad.AMD.COM> <205@octopus.UUCP>
Reply-To: eli@spdcc.COM (Steve Elias)
Organization: yes
Lines: 18

Peter Holzmann posted a great summary of the big disk issue...

here's two more cents...  i just managed to get an 85M maxtor running
on my clone, which has a phoenix bios.  the bios supposedly supported
this drive directly (as type 28).  i set it up as 28, but when i started
formatting with phoenix's format program -- it said there were only
768 cylinders...  apparently the phoenix bios is a bit confused, or perhaps
their formatting program...

the solution was the OnTrack disk manager (not for resale!?).  it allowed
my to use 'type 15 -- the reserved disk type'...  the disk manager writes
the drive configuration directly onto the start of the disk -- i guess the
bios is smart enough to look there for the heads/cylinders/precomp info...

in any case, there may be some problems i haven't hit yet -- but the 
Disk Manager software was the key factor in getting this drive formatted.
i used ibm at advanced diagnostics to do the lowlevel format after DM wrote
the heads/cylinders/precomp info at the start of the disk.