I recently bought a couple of used IBM-branded Sony SMO-F541 MO drives to play around with. The Workspace will not initialize 2.3 GB disk cartridges. I used mkfs to initialize one, but it won't mount.
Has anyone gotten a 5.25" MO drive to work with NEXTSTEP 3.3? I have a bunch of 3.5" Fujitsu drives that work great, including the 128 MB one I bought in 1993, though the 2.3 GB disks need to be formatted from the command line.
Without some trickery, I dont think NeXTstep will format a drive beyond 2GB. That may be part of the problem and so you probably will need to make a custom disktab for it.
I've made disktab entries for some SCSI hard drives bigger than 2GB, though what happens without a disktab in NEXTSTEP 3.3 is that the disk is cut up into one 2 GB slice (/dev/sd0a) and several (up to seven more) 1 GB slices, so a disktab allows having up to eight 2 GB slices but is not strictly necessary on 3.3. One can work around not having a disktab, which I do for 3.5" 2.3 GB MO disk cartridges for the Fujitsu drives, but the 5.25" 2.3 GB disk cartridges are double sided, meaning that there are two sides of about 1.1 GB each, so even without a disktab entry I was able to format each side fine with mkfs (Workspace gets some of the parameters wrong with mkfs, making it necessary to do it manually). The odd thing is that once formatted, the disks won't mount. It may be that the drive itself has some hardware problem or something is wrong with the filesystem I made on the disk cartridge; I just don't know. Perhaps I need to play more with the mkfs command line parameters.
I can confirm 640 Mb 3.5" MO disks can be used. 5.25" above 2 Gb, I have no idea, though...
Quote from: tjallen on September 09, 2024, 06:49:08 PMI've made disktab entries for some SCSI hard drives bigger than 2GB, though what happens without a disktab in NEXTSTEP 3.3 is that the disk is cut up into one 2 GB slice (/dev/sd0a) and several (up to seven more) 1 GB slices, so a disktab allows having up to eight 2 GB slices but is not strictly necessary on 3.3. One can work around not having a disktab, which I do for 3.5" 2.3 GB MO disk cartridges for the Fujitsu drives, but the 5.25" 2.3 GB disk cartridges are double sided, meaning that there are two sides of about 1.1 GB each, so even without a disktab entry I was able to format each side fine with mkfs (Workspace gets some of the parameters wrong with mkfs, making it necessary to do it manually). The odd thing is that once formatted, the disks won't mount. It may be that the drive itself has some hardware problem or something is wrong with the filesystem I made on the disk cartridge; I just don't know. Perhaps I need to play more with the mkfs command line parameters.
If I recall, the "auto disk tab" more often than not worked, and as you say, split the baby. However, often it didnt work as "well" which had varying amounts of weirdness to not working effects.
That said, I did have the 250ish and i think there was a 500mb fujitsu 3.5" that worked with no problems nor need for a disk tab. I also had a 5.25" drive that I think did around 650MB and it also worked fine.
For larger than 2GB drives, I only used hard drives and the way the drive was split annoyed me. And my ultimate solution was to double kick the system on intel (dont remember if I succeeded in doing this on motorola hardware) where you use a driver 'kick disk' to start the boot enough that it could see the main drive formatted with 1024byte blocks instead of 512, which let you format the drive to 4GB as one large drive. Regardless, that hackery required the disk tab to work.