Altos MP/M II Hard Disk Problems

[aplmak]

Hey gang... so I am trying to install two new hard drive images (via David G's MFM Emulator, no actual MFM hard disk) and according to what I have read (thanks t Al at bitsavers), MP/M 2.15 can handle drives up to 40mb. Well I have tried and tried various sizes over 10mb such as 20mb and 40 mb and the system just does not like them. I am not sure if Altos only installed a certain brand and they made it so only certain drives can be used or not?? Or a cylinder/head limitation... 10mb drives work just fine.

See the photos below. I keep getting the error when I launch INSTMPM, "Cylinder 0 is bad, cannot install MP/M on hard disk." Well I am not sure how it can be bad... it is an image.. and I have sucessfully formatted it with the Altos 580 v3.00 DIAG MON. 3.2 disk and all went fine.. Anyone with CP/M or MP/M experience have a thought out there?

 

[aplmak]

So I even tried this... hmmm.... So according to my notes a Miniscribe 3425 is 615 cylinders and 4 heads... even though the installer says to enter 306 cylinders and 6 heads... but it's formatted as 615 & 4.. I am going to try to reformat as 306 & 6 and see what happens.. then I am assuming if I wanted to bump up to 40mb I would do 736 & 6 on a larger created drive... I understand that MP/M does the whole logical and physical drive thing but I cannot even get to that point to create logical drive partitions... crazy..

Actually hang on... I will now build a new image with 306 cylinders and 6 heads on David's emulator and try that out...

 

[aplmak]

This doesn't make a lot of sense. So after many tries with various disk images, I just put the emulator back to drive 1 (original image) which is supposed to be 10mb and it reports 306 cylinders and it is a 580-10 machine. I'm really confused.. It seems to be a 10mb hard drive image... so I duplicated drive 1 as drive 2 and formatted and I selected #2 580-10 which also gave me 306 cylinders.. I am not sure how many heads it's currently configured at though.

So I am still stumped.. I'll just keep it at disk 1 10mb and disk 2 at 10mb.. even though according to MP/M 2.15 says you can go up to 40mb (not sure if that is each, or total)..

 

[KirkEBarrett]

Almak - i have a 586T and the power supply is a mess. Could we speak? It sounds like you've repaired some before. It just "pulses" the DC - Fans go, but DC on/off/on/off.
Sounds like you a 580 - that's the machine of my dreams - running OASIS8. I have one of those, but the HD contoller on mine is bad (the drive control works but the data lines are bad.

Re the 580 - you can only do 10MB HD partitions. That's the max. You can get OASIS and MP/M to kind of dual-boot, but no partition can be great than 10mb.
kirk @ cimbrian . com

Thank you so much!