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Help with low level formatting...

P

pad0

New Member
Joined
Jan 21, 2012
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Location
Torino, ITA
Hi everyone!
I have an old Olivetti M24 (a clone of AT&T 6300). It has a 10meg MFM hard drive (Tandon I suppose), and running Norton Disk Doctor it showed some bad sectors.
I thought it was time to do a low level format, but I don't have any idea on how to get into the HD controller's bios (after googling around i figured out that my controller is a DTC 5150 BX) and run the utility to do the LLF (the debug method working with some WD controllers didn't work for me...). I tried also with a simple format from DOS, but it didn't solve the problem.

Anyone with some ideas?
Thanks in advance!
 
You have two choices--you can install a standard DTC BXD ROM (make sure that jumpers are on W17 and W18 ) and enable it and use the debug method . The other choice is to load the System Diagnostics diskette and follow the procedure given in the System Maintenance Manual. The not-so-obvious thing is that when you get the "Do you want to continue?" the response is something like "1234" and not "y". Go figure.
 
Chuck(G) said:
And the service docs are available from Olivetti M24 as well as bitsavers.org. Note that the M24 site has lots of good stuff--including the schematics for the system.
Click to expand...

That Olivetti M24 site is very easy to use, I had to dig some on that NCR website but was suprised when it actually worked.
 
Thank you so much, guys! You really saved my day! I solved downloading the diagnostic tool via NCR site (awesome!).
I already knew the M24 vze site, but I wasn't able to write the diagnostic .img file to a floppy... Same problem with AT&T 6300 shrine site which also provides diskette images for diagnostic tool...

As far as you know, are these files written in a non-standard format? I even tried many programs to write these images (rawwrite, img2dsk...)
Thanks!

PS. about the "1234" answer on the prompt... LOL!
 
Last edited:
pad0 said:
Hi everyone!
I have an old Olivetti M24 (a clone of AT&T 6300). It has a 10meg MFM hard drive (Tandon I suppose), and running Norton Disk Doctor it showed some bad sectors.
I thought it was time to do a low level format, but I don't have any idea on how to get into the HD controller's bios (after googling around i figured out that my controller is a DTC 5150 BX) and run the utility to do the LLF (the debug method working with some WD controllers didn't work for me...). I tried also with a simple format from DOS, but it didn't solve the problem.

Anyone with some ideas?
Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

Why, I just did this a weekend ago! Here's where I documented the process: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcf...-lists-supposed-to-work&highlight=defect+list

For the AT&T PC 6300 you'll need the Hard Drive Utility diskette. I could have sworn this diskette was at the shrine at https://sites.google.com/site/att6300shrine/Home but it doesn't appear to be there. I will dump all of my 6300-related disks and put them online for you tonight.

When you LLF the drive, make sure you follow the procedure in my first link -- definitely enter the defect list and definitely use the option to "format defect list sectors" so that they can be locked out permanently.
 
pad0 said:
I already knew the M24 vze site, but I wasn't able to write the diagnostic .img file to a floppy... Same problem with AT&T 6300 shrine site which also provides diskette images for diagnostic tool... As far as you know, are these files written in a non-standard format? I even tried many programs to write these images (rawwrite, img2dsk...
Click to expand...

The files on the shrine site are just raw 360K disk dumps: 512-byte sectors, both heads, 9 sectors per track, 40 tracks per disk. All floppy utils should be able to write the disks. I tested the AT&T DOS 3.3 distro on the shrine myself so I'm not sure what trouble you ran into or why the NCR-downloaded files worked.

When I dump my 6300 disks tonight I'll write a few back to make sure they work.
 
Trixter said:
I will dump all of my 6300-related disks and put them online for you tonight.
Click to expand...

Dumped and verified! You can pick them up here if you like: ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/Hardware/ATT/6300

I also included disk2img and img2dsk, and pkzip and pkunzip, and a readme file that describes the contents, how they were dumped, and how to reconstruct them.

I'd update the 6300 Shrine, except I don't have administrative access to it any more.
 
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