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Formatting 51/4" Magneto Optical disks with DOS

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IBM Portable PC

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It appears that neither Future Domain PowerSCSI or Adaptec EZSCSI will do this (Partitioning, initializing or formatting).

The disk itself is 512 byte sector 2GB.

I have a utility from Fujitsu for their 31/2" MO drives, however it appears that Sony produced no such tool.

Any thoughts?
 
CorelSCSI has a program CFORMAT which the manual suggest should format MO discs. While I have an HP 5.25" MO drive, I don't have a spare disc to test nor is it hooked up to a DOS system. The HP drive came with a 1996 version of FormatterOne software which seems to be for Mac or Windows.

Correction: CorelSCSI should still do the formatting of cartridges but not with CFORMAT which is an OS/2 specific utility. It has a combined manual for supported OSes and I flipped to the wrong section.
 
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krebizfan said:
CorelSCSI has a program CFORMAT which the manual suggest should format MO discs. While I have an HP 5.25" MO drive, I don't have a spare disc to test nor is it hooked up to a DOS system. The HP drive came with a 1996 version of FormatterOne software which seems to be for Mac or Windows.

Correction: CorelSCSI should still do the formatting of cartridges but not with CFORMAT which is an OS/2 specific utility. It has a combined manual for supported OSes and I flipped to the wrong section.
Click to expand...

I've searched high and low for CorelSCSI and it's manual, any chance of a PDF and software?
 
RTUTIL.EXE, which came with my Rancho RT1000, appeared to successfully create a partition.

As a side-note, Rancho really appears to have produced an excellent SCSI controller including its BIOS and drivers etc. This is the third time it's solved an issue for me, it's BIOS also allows me to boot my Tandy 1000 from a 3.5" MO drive or from an Insite 20MB Floptical drive using a 1.44MB or 720K boot disk. Future Domain and Trantor were useless for these 3 projects.

I ran out of time and will look at formatting later this week.
 
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Is there any chance you can test the MO drive and disk with Windows just to make sure the setup works? If partitioned and formatted under Windows, it should be usable with DOS.

Could you provide information as to specific models for controller, drive and disk?

Is the disk actually 2 GB not 2.6GB? I remember that there were a number of manufacturer specific disks with non-standard storage that only worked with a few drive models.
 
When you say EZ-SCSI - do you mean the controller or the software package?
I use the controller's setup program on my Adaptec 1542 to format SCSI media, then boot DOS and do the FDISK/FORMAT.
 
krebizfan said:
Is there any chance you can test the MO drive and disk with Windows just to make sure the setup works? If partitioned and formatted under Windows, it should be usable with DOS.

Could you provide information as to specific models for controller, drive and disk?

Is the disk actually 2 GB not 2.6GB? I remember that there were a number of manufacturer specific disks with non-standard storage that only worked with a few drive models.
Click to expand...

I only have a couple of Macs and they don't have SCSI ports......except for a Ratoc FR1SX Firewire to SCSI adaptor which I'm looking forward to taking out with me one evening and placing it on one of the rails of a local rail freight line but I digress......

Models:
Rancho RT-1000 8 bit ISA controller
Sony RMO-S561 drive
2.3GB (1/2 per side) 512 Byte Sector new Sony media.
 
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