Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!geoff@moss.ATT.COM
From: geoff@moss.ATT.COM
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Low-level formatting of hard-drive
Message-ID: <37974@clyde.ATT.COM>
Date: 13 Dec 88 16:11:34 GMT
References: <0XcgYUy00W0YMr315a@andrew.cmu.edu>
Sender: nuucp@clyde.ATT.COM
Reply-To: geoff@moss.UUCP (Geoff Sherwood)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany NJ
Lines: 32

In article <0XcgYUy00W0YMr315a@andrew.cmu.edu> jc58+@andrew.cmu.edu (Johnny J. Chin) writes:
>
>come with a booklet telling you how to format the drive (low-level).  From
>my experience, most cases you use DEBUG and do a "G=C800:5" at the "-" prompt.
>I'm not exactly sure if this works for the OMTI controller, but in 98% of the
>controllers that I've come across in the past 4 years do use this address,

I have the OMTI 1:1 controller.  You do indeed format it with debug as described
above.  It works well.  The controller, on the other hand, is a pain in the
butt.  I do not recommend it.  You have to tell your bios that you do not have
a hard drive or you will get a drive controller failure on reboot which you
cannot clear (except by rebooting, of course, which doesn't help you worth
a damn).  I tried to bring up UNIX on the machine.  Of course, it looks at
the config area and won't work because you don't have a hard drive!  If
you fix the config area and ignore the failure,  UNIX still can't deal with
the drive.  The way this controller works (as I have heard; I am certainly no
expert at it) is that it writes its control info on an unused track.  My
OPTune disk interleaver/disk checker/disk optimizer very happily scribbles
all over this track trying to figure the optimum interleave (which was indeed
1:1 on a 20MHz 386).  Worked fine -- until I tried to reboot.  Boot failure
is not a happy error message.  Fortunately I had backed up my hard disk
(Seagate 4096) so recovery was not a problem.

Conclusion:  the OMTI works if you use MS-DOS and do not have any programs
that scribble on that track.  If I had known this, though, I would not have
bought this controller.

	geoff sherwood
	att!moss!burl!geoff

P.S. If someone can tell me how to get past the chicken-and-egg problem with
UNIX and the bios, PLEASE DO!