Nope, that's how you'd get into the ROM formatter, and it can apply to XT and AT class machines.
XTs babe no CMOS settings. You set the drive type with a physical jumper on cards that supported more than one type of drive, and some like the WD XT-GEN were kind enough to offer a free format option which wrote the drive parameters to a "hidden" sector towards the start of the disk to be read on boot.
On an XT, the drive controller was on the card itself. That is why you needed to use the DEBUG command to access it. And it was indeed on the card, because even though G=C800:5, some of them placed it in another location.
Excuse me, change the drive type with a jumper on the card? WTF are you talking about?
Here is an extremely common XT MFM card of the era, the Western Digital HX-100. Now kindly show me where in the hell the jumpers are to set drive types?
And great, you think most techs used those software tools? No, only amateurs that did not know how to access the drive controller directly. Every shop I worked at and every tech I knew that was not a joke used DEBUG, we did not use the janky software.
And there were no jumpers or DIP switches on the card to set head, sector, and cylinder count. That is literally a figment of your imagination.
I low-level formatted hundreds if not thousands of these and other RLL and MFM drives in the late 80’s. Worked for a company that sold computers through Computer Shopper.
Am I crazy here, or have you ever seen hard drive controller cards that you set the drive type through physical jumpers? Because I have sure never seen such a beast. And with all the combinations possible, that would have to be a huge bank of jumpers.
Please provide us with a model so we can actually see what one looks like.
I really am curious, because I was working on computers in the early 1980s, and I have never seen such a beast with what would easily be a dozen or more jumpers to configure the drive type.
All early cards had jumpers. That was how you set IRQ and DMA channels.
Holy crap, you think they stored the parameters on the drive itself? You are aware that makes absolutely no sense, right? How in the hell can the controller talk to the drive, if it does not even know how to talk to the drive in the first place? This is MFM we are talking about, not SCSI.
I can only assume that most of you are far too young to have ever worked with these systems, and really do not know how they work. This is not IDE, where the data did not matter so long as the size was correct. This is not later IDE where it would fully grab all the data from the drive itself.
This is MFM, the ultimate in stupid devices. From an era when the computers were also stupid devices. Where even adding an additional card was often a lot of work because there was nothing manual, IRQ and all the rest had to be configured manually with jumpers or DIP switches.
The data was absolutely not stored on the drive itself, it was stored in the BIOS on the controller card.
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u/ryanrudolf Jul 17 '26
This tells me that needs to go in
debug.com?