Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!watmsg!mwnewman
From: mwnewman@watmsg.waterloo.edu (mike newman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: disc testing
Message-ID: <34378@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 18 Feb 90 19:30:10 GMT
References: <690@m1.cs.man.ac.uk>
Sender: daemon@watmath.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: mwnewman@watmsg.waterloo.edu (mike newman)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 31

In article <690@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> pjj@r2.uucp (Pete Jinks) writes:
>7) I have been offered a formatter that will give 11 sectors per track. Could
>   anyone with experience of using discs with 10 or 11 sectors per track
>   comment ?

I've used various 10/11 sector-per-track formatters.  However, I stopped
using them a while back after I seemed to be getting more disk errors
then other family members on the same machine.  Errors included desktop
claiming a non-empty disk was empty (although if booted from, auto programs
would work) - usually cured by a cold boot; erasure of the boot sector -
which I was able to fix by copying a boot sector from another disk of the
same format; and the final straw for me - complete erasure of all fat and
directory sectors on the disk.

This would happen during completely normal disk usage, hence my suspicion
of the extra sector formatters (although I'm not really sure).

Another thing: I remember reading in an old copy of the developer docs or
the abacus disk book (sorry can't remember which, I don't have it here)
about the minimum space needed for the control information (required for
each sector) and the acutal available space per track, and concluding that
11 sectors is impossible: it won't fit (?!?), and 10 is very tight.

Does anyone know if extra-sector formatters are "playing by the rules"?  Do
they push the capacity beyond what it can safely hold?  Is all this in my
imagination?  Anyone else having such problems?  It would be really nice
to get that extra storage.  (-: It would be even nicer to get a hard disk :-)


mwnewman@watmsg.waterloo.edu
mike newman, co-minister of terrorism and propaganda, Cubic Earth Society :-)