[pups] RE: Unix Archive mirror site offer

[Martijn van Buul]

Fred N. van Kempen wrote:
 
> When playing, I noticed that the RD51 is a plain Seagate ST412 MFM drive...
> did anyone try to use other MFM disks with the RQDX series controllers?  I
> can probably get some very cheap ST251 40MB drives.. ;)

I've done exactly the same thing (but it only was an ST225, AKA RD31) on
an RQDX3 controller. You need the XXDP 2.5 diagnostic kit for that. Having
a couple of 5.25" HD diskdrives really helps. Some of these drives (the
older, the better ;) can be used as RX33 drive, which greatly reduces the
problem of creating a XXDP bootdisk with the needed utilities, since you
can write these disks in a (second :) 5.25" drive on a standard PC. 

Finding a supply of 1.2 MB 5.25" disks can be a bigger problem - I'm 
very happy with my newly found pack of *fresh* disks.

I may still have such a diskimage floating around somewhere (Yup, I seem
to have). The basic idea is to low-level format the MFM drive, and make it
look like a genuine DEC drive. This is a lot easier if the drives you
want to use were also sold as DEC drives (which is the case with the
ST251 - it's also known as the RD32). If not, you'll have to provide
a lot more information about the drive - never really tried that. 

This said, I sucessfully low-levelled a 21MB Miniscribe (with the same
CHS-layout as a ST225) using the RD31 parameters.

-- 
    Martijn van Buul -  Pino at dohd.org - http://www.stack.nl/~martijnb/
	 Geek code: G--  - Visit OuterSpace: mud.stack.nl 3333
   Kees J. Bot: The sum of CPU power and user brain power is a constant.

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