[SunRescue] RE: Bob blames his tools...

[Ken Hansen]

Bob,

My grandfather used to say "A good carpenter never blames his tools." ;^)

Ken
(WHo is developing quite a collectionof 210-424 meg bricks, I plan on using them for a foundation on my son's play house!

Ken

-----Original Message-----
<snip>

Sadly, my recent SS10 box is having some disk drive read error probs.
The drive really is probably good enough to work with, but, will
really probably require a low-level a few times through.  Thus a
slight dilemma.... I usually format on a VAX, first (the old VAX,
as plug-ugly as it is, has the nice built-in rom formatter that can
format anything, almost including the kitchen sink.  The sun formatter,
on the other hand, IMHO is the worst program ever written to format
anything.  That's heresy on a sun list, I know.....(:+\\...., but,
in my hands half the time it works, but only if you have a drive that
it really knows precisely.  Also, half the big format.dat file entries
never seem to work right the first time, and usually require padding
values here and there, until it is right.  If you don't have a drive
on the format.dat list, it becomes a hit and miss turkey shoot to get
it right.  Been there, done that, always wring hands in the air, and
ruined some nice Fujitsu dries recently, too.....(:+{{......

So, before I convert the HP 2490A drive into a less-than-optimal
paperweight, does anyone know for sure if the format.dat entry
for this drive actually works, exactly?

disk_type = "Hewlett Packard C2490A" \
	: ctlr = SCSI : fmt_time = 17 \
	: trks_zone = 3146 : asect = 0 : atrks = 198 \
	: ncyl = 2159 : acyl = 2 : pcyl = 2582 \
	: nhead = 18 : nsect = 107 \
	: rpm = 6400 : bpt = 55296

Thanks, and sorry for venting spleen... but I hate, absolutely hate,
trashing good drives because of a dumb formatter.

Bob