Chris Robbins (K4U)
29 Sandpit Lane
St. Albans
Herts AL1 4EW
Phone : 01727 830264
____________________________
Help/Advice wanted PLEASE, about:-
Watford Electronics
30 Megabyte Winchester Disc
& the accompanying Superform
hard disk formatting program
____________________________
I've recently acquired the above and would like further information
especially about the use of the Superform formatting programming.
The manual that comes with it is useless when it comes to any
essential information about driving the formatter.
I can understand some of the prompts such as the number of heads
(currently set to 4) and cylinders (currently set to 612), but points
that bother me are
'Step rate Code' (currently set to 1)
What are the other step rate codes and what do they mean? Are they
important? Can I change the step rate code to improve performance and
is this wise?
RWCC (currently set to 128)
I've deduced that this stands for Reduced Write Current Cylinder, but
what does it mean, and what are the other possibilities?
Fill Byte (currently set to &6C)
I presume Fill Byte is what it fills the sectors up with, but why &6C,
why not &FF?
And most important - Landing Zone (currently set to zero). This seems
a bit strange, unless the formatter reverses the cylinder numbering;
landing the head on cylinder 0 seems to be the last place you'd want
it to be.
The hard disk itself is a Seagate ST238R, and as far as I've been able
to determine the Seagate specification for this is :-
Cylinders = 615
Heads = 4
WPC = -1
(Write Pre-Compensation Cylinder)
Parking Cylinder = 670
Sectors = 26
Some of these parameters are obviously different to those that
Superform uses, the number of sectors per track for instance, which
Superform sets to 47 (it doesn't even ask for number of sectors, it's
built into the Superform program! presumably to make the hard disk
sectors per track compatible with ADFS).
Could Superform's RWCC be the same thing as Seagate's WPC?
Why does Superform use 612 (and not 615) for the number of cylinders?
And how can Seagate specify 670 as the parking cylinder if the disc
only has 615 cylinders in total?
Help!!!