sector interleave
Karl Denninger
karl at ddsw1.MCS.COM
Mon Oct 2 23:50:14 AEST 1989
In article <358 at mplex.UUCP> fff at mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) writes:
>We recently replaced an ailing IBM disk controller with a Western Digital
>WD1006 in an IBM AT running Xenix 2.2.1 and used a program from
>comp.binaries.ibm.pc called "iau" to change the interleave. To our surprise
>the program, which performs interleave adjustments non-destructively on DOS
>disks, trashed the Xenix filesystem on the disk.
>
>I don't understand why this would happen. Seems to me the order of the
>sectors in a track is of little concern to operating systems. Can anybody
>explain why this wouldn't work?
Sounds like the utility is a little too smart for it's own good, and tried
to do something with what it thought was a MSDOS system disk...
>Also, anybody know of a utility that non-destructively changes disk interleave
>and runs under Xenix?
We have used Speedstor (Storage Dimensions' product) to change interleave on
Xenix disks and have not yet had a problem. You do need to be somewhat
careful; we always set up the disk as having one less cylinder than it
really does have (in case we need to run diags on it in the future); I do
not believe this is significant.
For RLL disks, you need to say "/secs:26" on the Speedstor command line.
This utility has been quite helpful for refreshing the format on a few disk
drives that we have here without having to dump and reload the data. I
would back it up first anyway (we always do), but we've never needed the
backup yet :-)
--
Karl Denninger (karl at ddsw1.MCS.COM, <well-connected>!ddsw1!karl)
Public Access Data Line: [+1 312 566-8911], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910]
Macro Computer Solutions, Inc. "Quality Solutions at a Fair Price"
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