"Matt Mc_Carthy" wrote to "MIKE ROSS" (05 Jan 03  11:50:41)
 --- on the topic of "ll format ?"

 MM> Not all of us!   :-)   But, I downloaded a bit more 'real life' last
 MM> week and am still playing catchup here in TECH.

There were some fido gremlins over the holidays too IIRC...


 MM> I just finished searching 20 years of files and strangely, come up
 MM> with NOTHING on that particular ESDI drive.  Is that the one with the
 MM> finned cast aluminum case that was split down the center with a gasket
 MM> in between?  This was a model that Maxtor bought out from MiniScribe,
 MM> and was never noted for reliability.  In any case, you didn't provide
 MM> the drive model number, which might be more helpful.

Yes, of course but isn't the drive number irrelevant since the hdc
communicates properly? In any case I made a mistake in stating it was a
Maxtor since it is in fact a Micropolis 1558-15, with 18ms step rate.


 MM> In any case, you DO need to leave the controller BIOS enabled, and
 MM> work from within there.

You are very likely right about that...


 MM> The "330Meg" is a number you will never see.  I just ran
the math for
 MM> your reported 270Meg, and even with the "1048..." calculation comes
 MM> out short at about 283Meg.  I seem to recall those formatting to
 MM> 318Meg.
 MM> Working with 1024 x 15 x 36 comes out to 276Meg, and formatting will
 MM> likely use up that 6 Meg to arrive at or near your 270 Meg.  From that
 MM> point, it does look like you are up against the '1024 cylinder
 MM> barrier'.

The factory lable states 382M capacity but I suppose that is counted "by
the bit" which includes the ECC bits and other engineering stuff but
some hd listings have it as 338M and as I said the mb bios setup finds
330M with C-1224, H-15, S-36. I also came up with 330M if 1Meg is 1024K,
but if dos calculates 1M as 1048.5K (i.e. 1024^2) that would still be
322M right? Minus the formatting I suppose it may reduce by 1/10'th at
most so still leave at least 300M (in dos Megs)... Why does everybody
insist on a different definition of 1Meg? :(

BTW it did format the full capacity with the config.sys driver loaded
though it was split up into a small forest of 32M volumes A-J. :(


 MM> What does FDISK say after the LL format?  Whatever FDISK says will be
 MM> the max for that particular setup and configuration.
[...]
 MM> Good luck...  M.

Thanks for your kind words. I did the hdc's bios format and it gave the
full drive capacity. The controller docs specifically mention disabling
the bios for dos other than 3.x etc which has a 32M limit and assigning
the whole drive to a single volume before partitioning with the "other"
dos.

What I think the current problem may be is dos 6.22, when reading the
present 90M active partition, sees a "previous" 270M value written in it
by dos 5.0 and decides the extended partition can't be more than 180M.
That's the only explanation I can make sense of. I'll let you know if
removing the last active partition restores the full capacity otherwise
I'll have to go back to the hdc's bios and try again.

 Mike
 ****

--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30