Reply 20 of 32, by Thallanor
I might be getting somewhere! And a lot of it is due to my stupidity.
I started digging through threads I _know_ I've read before, especially from Cloudshatze who is who I first picked up on the Trantor T-128 working in Tandys from. He also indicated FDISK only seeing about one-third the disk space available. I've read this a few times but my brain blanked. He confirmed that the only way to get this to work was to use TFORMAT. So I decided to double up my efforts there.
This is what led to me feeling _really_ stupid. TFORMAT has failed every time I tried, and I did briefly dabble in trying to to get the ASPI drivers to work, but it always indicated no SCSI adapter found too. It turns out that I was using the wrong one. MA120.SYS is the correct one. It supports the 120, 128, and a couple other models. Immediately, booting from floppy, it saw the SCSI adapter, followed by the SCSI2SD!
I gave TFORMAT another try, and sure enough, it saw the SCSI2SD and so using the /L (low-level format) and /S60 (for sector size) switch, I started low-level formatting the drive. This is where I ran into the exact same thing I noticed with FORMAT C: /S - namely that the drive activity light would go solid. TFORMAT gives a bit more detail than FORMAT, and you could see it just grinding, one cluster at a time, usually 15-30 seconds per cluster. This could take months, literally, as the low-level format has to churn through about 32K of these.
So taking the advice here, I did two things - I swapped SCSI cables again _and_ I turned off termination on the SCSI2SD. TFORMAT is now churning through a few clusters per second. I expect 30-60 minutes to complete, which for an old 8 Mhz Tandy w/ an 8-bit SCSI adapter on a 1 GB drive, I imagine is about right. When done though, I'm going to test the cable and termination individually to see which might have made it work. I'm still confused as to how disabling termination actually allows this to work at all. Does anyone know what might cause that? The SCSI2SD manual states that if termination is off, and it needs to be on, that small transfers might work, but large ones will fail. I'm just surprised it works, period.
So now I wait until the low-level format completes. This is pretty exciting though! A 1 GB partition on a 25-year old 286 Tandy is kind of overkill, but eh. 😀