Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!mcf!teemc!mibte!jbh
From: jbh@mibte.UUCP (James Harvey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Hard Disks
Summary: some more things.
Keywords: NEW USER HELP AMIGA COMPANION
Message-ID: <2804@mibte.UUCP>
Date: 14 May 89 13:41:46 GMT
References: <6385@ardent.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Lines: 114

I wrote these notes and submitted them to my local User Group
newsletter.  Thought I would post it here as it may help someone
and perhaps someone could point out flaws in my procedures.  Feel
free to shoot holes in any of it, it worked for me.

---  Cut Here ---

Hard Drive Notes - Jim Harvey - 4/9/89

Recently I learned some things about 1.3 and the Commodore 2090 controller that
may be useful to anyone with similar equipment.  More specifically, I own am
Amiga 2000 with 1.2 Kickstart, a 2090 plain, and Miniscribe 8425 ST506 type
drives.


Educational Experience 1:

I wanted to re-structure the DH0 hard drive to have a single track set aside
for parking the heads, and two Fast File System partitions.  The problems began
when I tried to format the second FFS partition.  Instant massive Guru.  Does
this sound familier?

I won't go through all the different things I tried to get the drive correctly
formatted.  It was really frustrating.  What finally worked was:

  1. Make a backup copy of the DEVS/MountList file.
  2. Edit the MountList, remove ALL partitioning entrys.  Leave only RES0.
  3. Mount and PREP RES0: per the 2000 manual Appendix G. Tell PREP that the
drive is all one partition (last track is highest physical).
  4. Reboot, run BindDrivers, and format the whole drive using the OLD FILE
SYSTEM.
  5. Restore the MountList with all your nice FFS partition entrys.
  6. Prep the drive AGAIN.  This time tell prep that your first partition is as
small as you desire.
  7. Now reboot, mount your partitions one at a time, and format them using the
QUICK option of the 1.3 Format command (surprise! no GURU!).

This works because there is no physical difference between a freshly formatted
FFS sector and a formatted OFS sector.  A quick format only rebuilds the boot
sector, the root sector and the file bitmap.  I believe you can skip steps 1-4,
simply change the MountList, and do quick formats.  You really should clean off
all old data with a real format though or you will be in real trouble if you
ever have to use DiskSalv on the partition.


Educational Experience 2:

After formatting the disk you should check to see if the Fast File System was
really installed.  You can tell from Workbench by clicking once on the disk
icon, then selecting INFO from the rightmost pull down menu.  INFO will show
you, amoung other things, the number of bytes per block.  If this is 512, you
have a Fast File partition.  If there are only 488, you have the Old File
System.  Note that any partitions above the first have to be mounted from CLI
before the disk icon will appear on the Workbench screen.  In fact, the first
(DH0) partition and it's icon won't really get mounted until something tries to
use it.  This leads to...


Educational Experience 3:

Contrary to the book, you don't have to have any Old File System partitions on
the drive at all.  If the entire drive is formatted with FFS you will get a
"Not a DOS Disk" requester if you attempt to access DH0: BUT if you never
attempt to access DH0, DOS is none the wiser.  Here is my boot floppy
Startup-Sequence;

     FastMemFirst
     SetPatch > NIL:
     BindDrivers
     Mount FAST1:
     Assign SYS: FAST1:
     Assign ...  Everything else to FAST1:
     NewCLI from FAST1:S/StartupI

FAST1 is an FFS partition with all the workbench and DOS files.  The NewCLI
completes the transfer of control to the Hard Drive.  From there three other
scripts are started with NewCLI.  If I have a multitasking machine, I may as
well use multitasking to boot it quicker.  DH0 is never touched and it's icon
never appears.  Since DH0: is never really mounted, the disk buffers it would
have used never get allocated so I have more memory available.

Note: an autobooting 2090A controller can't do this because the FFS routines
are not in ROM (Yet).  Also a MountList entry declaring FFS starting at track
two will be needed.  Use some name other that DH0, mount it, and format it. 
DOS apparently refuses to format the default first partition as Fast File
System.


Educational Experience 4:

I don't know if this is true for all ST506 drives on 2090 controllers, but when
the computer is re-booted with Control-Amiga-Amiga, the head stepper takes 10
seconds or so to S-L-O-W-L-Y vibrate back to track zero.  Recently I picked up
a second used Miniscribe drive and stuffed it into the 2000.  Now both drives
do the slow hunt for track zero which means about 20 seconds of waiting on a
re-boot.

I've found a way to eliminate this.  I'll pass this along with a disclaimer:
This may ultimately harm your Hard Drive.  When you Prep your drive one of the
questions asked is "Do you want the heads to automatically park after 3
seconds?". If you answer Yes, you get to pick the track it parks on.  I created
a single track partition on track two and told Prep to park on it.  This is as
close to track 0 as I can get as tracks 0 and 1 are reserved (RES0:).  It may
be cheating but re-boots are a LOT faster.
-----   Cut Here -------
-- 

Jim Harvey                        |      "Ask not for whom the bell
Michigan Bell Telephone           |      tolls and you will only pay
29777 Telegraph                   |      Station-to-Station rates."
Southfield, Mich. 48034           | 

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