"standard" number of tracks for removable r/w optical disks???

[David G. Jones]

Typical!  Our new read/write magnetic-optical disk arrives and there's
very little documentation.  We seem to have figured everything out except
for the number of "cylinders".

Since the whole point (for us) is that we can conveniently move disks
between drives of different vendors, on different machines, it strikes me
that we should use a "standard" format.

Our doc claims 18751 tracks, 31 sectors, 512 bytes/sector, 2400 rpm.

Our drive has an Emulex MD21 controller which supposedly requires 4
cylinders (SunOS 4.1 system and network admin, ch 10, maintaining disks,
p275).  If we use acyl=2, this leaves ncyl=18745.  No go.

Someone suggested ncyl=18608.

What is the correct answer?  Can a drive handle disks formatted
differently?

The Sun manual also claims that for our MD21 controller, we also need to
specify fmt_time=, cache=, trks_zone=, asect= in /etc/format.dat.  Does
anyone have a valid /etc/format.dat entry they can send me?

thanks for your help,
   I'll summarize if there is interest,
      Dave Jones
      djones at awesome.berkeley.edu