Panasonic PD 650MB LM-R650E

Hi everyone,

I have a Panasonic LF-1004 PD drive connected via a Alsystems Powertec SCSI 2 card and I have a question regarding formatting a PD disk for use with RISC OS, does anyone know a way to format the disks for RISC OS or does anyone have any software to do this?

Hope someone can help!

Kind regards,
Daniel.

The PowerMgr software supplied with the card should allow you to create a RISC OS partition on the drive, I think.

I have tried using !PowerMgr, but after doing a low level format first everything is greyed out and I can’t define a new RISC OS partition. Anyone got any ideas?

Do you actually need to partition? Some systems would create volumes without partitioning. (even today ADFS doesn’t really know about partitions)

I think Powertec did have its own partitioning system though. Not sure what the greyness is about.

If you’re on RISC OS 3.5 or earlier you can’t have volumes bigger than 512MB, but I’d have expected partitions to be available to work around this.

PD is simple 512 bytes/sector stuff, so you can use any old SCSI formatter if you don’t need partitions. Maybe try modern HForm? Or the good old RISC OS 2 (or 3.1?) SCSIform?

I wonder if the Low Level format ruined it. There were certain devices back in the day that needed special treatment after a LL format. Outside RISC OS of course.

I am running on a RiscPC using RISC OS 3.7 and I have tried using the modern !HForm which doesn’t find any devices, You mention doing something outside of RISC OS?

I have been using the Powertec partitioning system, when I say everything is greyed out, I mean the up and down arrows for partitioning the size.

Please see the screenshot of the SCSI drive partitioning window at www.thejollyrogerbbs.com/PDDisk.jpg

Thanks…
Daniel.

Have you got the write-protect tab set on the disc?

^ The little purple thing here.

The disc write protect tab is not enabled as I had done a Low Level format first.

I had a custom SCSI formatter for SyQuests and Magneto-Opticals that wrote various Mac and PC formats, but I’m pretty sure I just used HForm for the PD drive because that was only ever ADFS format (and always in two partitions, a 512MB and the rest).

Mine was on a Morley interface. But I don’t remember if there was any Morley-specific software. If there was, I seem to have misplaced it.

I think there’s a driver called MagOpt kicking around somewhere – I remember trying it out on a SCSI Zip drive before I got the PowerZip driver.

Ah, this might be it — https://acorn.huininga.nl/pub/mirrors/ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/systems/acorn/riscos/ftp.demon.co.uk/utils/ — look for “pd-magfs.arc”. Took some finding.

Hi Phil, thanks for the link, but I have already tried that one before, I have tried most of the SCSI tools that exist from various manufactures and it didn’t work with the PD drive, but thank you for looking… I may try hooking it up to a PC and see if I can do anything there, but not sure what software to use. Regards, Daniel.

If the drive is visible on pc you can dd ( or some windows tool) a blank file with filecore format. No idea if it works, but it is a option.