Subject: Re: Sider Hard Disk
From: mistermcd@moc.liamtoh (MisterMcD)
Date: Thu, Jun 25, 1998 213
 EDT
Message-id: <898823011.865331@michelob>

In article <MPG.ff9c6fb4036eb0a989699@news.mindspring.com>, rcain3@mindspring.com (The Silicon Knight) wrote:
>In article <358FDFE8.34CB@abacom.com>, cfao@abacom.com says...
>> I need a program to format en partition my Sider Hard Disk from
>> (FirstClass Perapherals) on my Apple IIe
>> 
>Their is a utility that will format the hard drive on the installation 
>disk.  It should also be on the boot partition.  The same utility is also 
>capable of doing a low level format by entering a "back door".  Sorry, 
>but I can't remember exactly how to get in through the "back door".  
>Maybe, someone else can help there.


I seem to recall the sider controller being VERY similar to a controller 
developed by a friend of mine some years ago. I was asked about 2 years ago 
how to format it, and I wrote the following document which I just found hiding 
on my hard drive....

Formatting an Apple II SASI hard drive (Cobra / SLS / Sider controller).

From the memory of MisterMcD. That being said, USE AT OWN RISK


REQUIRED SOFTWARE:      PROSEL'S BLOCK WARDEN or any ProDOS BLOCK EDITOR
                                       COPY II+ (for formatting)

WARNING!!! THE FOLLOWING PROCEDURE WILL DESTROY ALL DATA ON THE HARD DRIVE!

LOW-LEVEL (FACTORY) FORMATTING

STEP#1: Get yourself to the Applesoft Basic prompt ( ] ) and type CALL -151 to 
enter the monitor.
STEP#2: Enter the following commands:

(first, determine the slot your controller is in and refer to the following 
legend: )

x=D for slot #5, x=E for slot #6, x=F for slot #7

C0x0:01 drive select (unit #1)
C0x1:80 drive select (type)
C0x1:00 drive select (reset controller)
C0x0:04 initialize drive (1st parameter)
C0x0:00 initialize drive (2nd parameter)
C0x0:00 initialize drive (3rd parameter)
C0x0:00 initialize drive (4th parameter)
C0x0:03 drive interleave (3 is best)
C0x0:00 begin format (point of no return )

When drive light goes out and ticking sounds stop, the LOW LEVEL format is 
complete.

That was the easy part. Now for the tricky part.

PARTITIONING

STEP #3:        Boot up your ProSEL BLOCK WARDEN or any ProDOS BLOCK EDITOR
                Largest partition that ProDOS can handle is 32meg, or 65534 
blocks, FFFF HEX.
                You need to find out just how large the partition is. Lets 
assume the drive is a 32meg.
                Log onto the hard drive by giving slot and drive # (typically 
slot 7 drive 1).
                You can try to read sector FFFF, if you get an error, read 
FF00, if that works, read 
                FF01, etc etc until you get an error. Lets assume the last 
sector you could read
                successfully before you got the error was FF15. REMEMBER THIS 
NUMBER!!
                This number minus 1 is your partition size ( FF14 ). 

STEP#4          Using block warden, read Block 02 of the hard drive. You have 
to modify bytes 29
                and 2A. In the above example, our end block was FF14,  so, you 
would enter the 
                value 14 into byte 29 and the value FF into byte 2A. These two 
bytes tell ProDOS
                the partition size. Make sure you write the changes to the 
hard drive and then

STEP#4a If your drive is 32meg or smaller, skip to the next step. If you have 
a drive larger
                than 32meg, you will have to set up the 2nd partition. You do 
this following the
                the same procedures as STEP #3 and STEP #4, except you would 
log onto slot 7
                drive 2 instead of drive 1. 




HIGH-LEVEL (OPERATING SYSTEM) FORMATTING

STEP #5         Restart the system and boot up COPY II+ or any ProDOS disk 
utility. You now 
                have to FORMAT the hard drive. Do this as you would a floppy 
disk.

STEP #6         Copy PRODOS.SYSTEM and BASIC.SYSTEM to the hard drive to make 
it
                a bootable system disk.
                
That should be all she wrote. Once this is all done, your hard drive should be 
back up and running to its fullest capacity (well, actually, it'll be blank, & 
you can get it back to full capacity - yeah, bad joke. ) 


Sorry for the terrible formatting of the document, but it was originally an MS 
Word file that I just drop copied to my news reader :)


MisterMcD