Low level format with MIO? Need MIO Disk or other utility

[hunter44102]

HI I am trying to format an old 90MB MFM hard drive with a 256k MIO. The drive has never been formatted for Atari but I know it works. Does anyone have a disk image of the MIO disk which I don't have?

 

Or is there another way to do a low level format? I don't see any mention of it in SpartaDOS

[+Nezgar]

You'll need the HDPHFMT8.COM or HDPHFMT9.COM "hard drive physical format" utilities from ICD. I believe they would have come with the MIO disks, not necessarily SpartaDOS. I'll post them here tonight if you haven't found them by then.

[hunter44102]

You'll need the HDPHFMT8.COM or HDPHFMT9.COM "hard drive physical format" utilities from ICD. I believe they would have come with the MIO disks, not necessarily SpartaDOS. I'll post them here tonight if you haven't found them by then.

 

 

Thanks, I just found the ATR of that MIO disk on this forum (link below), and I am in the middle of Low Level formatting with HDPHFMT9 right now. Its marking all the bad sectors and now is 'ReFormatting".

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/127001-mio-setup/

[Marius]

Is a low level format really needed? I never formatted a SCSI harddrive on the BlackBox in the past. I always did simply a FMTDIR with a bad sector check. Perhaps this is different on the MIO?

[+Larry]

Yes, with MFM drives. Presumably the OP has a bridge board (Adaptec, etc.) since only a very few of the early SCSI drives could be used with the original MIO. Because he is using the original MIO rom, he needs to get it to 256-byte sectors. Of course, with the new rom, many more SCSI drives can be used, and no formatting is required. Back in 1985 or so, this MIO was the ultimate setup!

 

-Larry

[BillC]

Yes, with MFM drives. Presumably the OP has a bridge board (Adaptec, etc.) since only a very few of the early SCSI drives could be used with the original MIO. Because he is using the original MIO rom, he needs to get it to 256-byte sectors. Of course, with the new rom, many more SCSI drives can be used, and no formatting is required. Back in 1985 or so, this MIO was the ultimate setup!

 

-Larry

More than just early SCSI drives can be reconfigured for 256 byte sectors, the 18GB Ultra2 Cheetah(ST118202LW/LC) can be reconfigured to this mode using the Seatools Enterprise Edition software, although I believe the sectors #s don't change so it effectively becomes a 9GB drive. This is still plenty for an 8-bit Atari though, BITD I used mine with a 40MB ST-251 MFM/Adaptec 4000 combo.

 

The following is from page 7 of the manual.

 

Selectable even byte sector sizes from 180 to 4,096 bytes/sector

 

I doubt the MIO would work with this drive using the original firmware, but there have been reports of even larger(73GB) SCSI HDD working with the V1.41 firmware, but I believe the 18GB Cheetah is the largest Seagate SCSI HDD that is capable of 256 byte sectors.

[sl0re]

back in the day on PCs MFM controllers had a low level format program on the card you could activate from a command prompt in dos (debug g=c800:5 for adaptec).

 

I actually ran a MFM drive on an MIO forever ago but do not recall how I low level formatted it.

 

I do recall low level was required for MFM drives.

Edited November 5, 2017 by sl0re