compaq portable plus problems

[Curt at Atari Museum]

Hmmm......   What you need is a copy of the orig CPQ System Utilities 
diskette that shipped with the Portable, it would've had hdformat.com on 
it to do a low-level on the HD...   I'm trying to think if early PC-DOS 
2.21 (I think it was a powdery pink colored label DOS diskette) may have 
had a generic low level formatter on it.



Curt


Roger Pugh wrote:
>
> On 3 Feb 2008, at 16:08, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
>
>> Should work, the controller is a Western Digital, I don't know about 
>> the Rodime drive, but I've done is numerous times with Seagate drives:
>>
>> debug command g=c800:5
>>
>> You should get into the WD monitor ROM and be able to do a low level, 
>> make sure you set the interleave correctly, I've used 3:1 as it was 
>> always a safe setting.
>>
>
>> Roger Pugh wrote:
>>> Hi guys
>>>
>>> does anyone know the correct incantation to low level format an MFM 
>>> drive, a rodime 351, driven by a Compaq controller board.
>>>
>>> I,ve tried with debug G=C800:5 to no avail.  there is no format 
>>> program there!.
>>> The driver board has no real description on it, just
>>>
>>> Compaq computer corp 1983 and  assy 61-031074-00
>>>
>
> checking on debug,  d=c000:0   the rom is compaq with no refrence to 
> western digital,  although the board contains WD silicon.  |I think i 
> have a homegrown compaq product here.  i know it was original in the 
> m/c along with the HD.  Debug just locks up after calling the program.
>
> roger
>
>
>