User guide

The process of formatting is quite simple and is accomplished
through the diagnostic program. First, turn the format switch on
and power up the drive.
FOR 10 AND 20 MEGABYTE DRIVES, YOU MUST MAKE
SURE THE HEAD RE-ZEROES AND THE DRIVE IS READY.
ON 5 MEGABYTE DRIVES THE HEADS MAY NOT RE-ZERO
UNTIL YOU BEGIN FORMATTING.
The FORMAT option is a hidden suboption of the CP/M diagnos-
tic program (CDIAGNOS.COM) and should be performed only
under the direct supervision of Corvus Customer Service person-
nel. To format the drive, run CDIAGNOS from your diskette based
system and select the UPDATE option. Follow the procedures
previously described, but specify the controller firmware file
name with the extension .FMT instead of .CLR .
The program will prompt you for the Corvus drive # (usually 1)
and warn you that it is about ready to format the drive. The format
operation will take 1 - 2 minutes depending on the drive size (5 MB
drives are slower). If you get a R/W error, try repeating the opera-
tion. If this fails, you may have a hardware problem.
When it has finished, the program asks you to power down the
drive, turn off the format switch, and power up the drive. The drive
should re-zero and come ready. (Allow 30 to 90 seconds.) If it does,
you have
successfully formatted the drive. If the process fails at
any point, you should start again, checking all connections care-
fully before proceding.
If you have successfully formatted the drive, the next step is to
write the spare track table. If you salvaged the original spare track
table, just write the new tracks using the DRIVE PARAMETERS
option of the diagnostic program. If you could not retrieve the
table, you must use the CRC/FORMATcheck to find any errors and
spare them out. In either case, you should run at least one pass of
the CRC/FORMAT check to ensure there are no other errors. See
the next section for more information.
3-11