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PARK.DOC
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1994-02-16
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A
Configurable
Disk Parking Utility
for
IBM PC clones
Copyright 1991 Dave Dunfield
All rights reserved.
Configurable Park Utility Page: 1
1. INTRODUCTION
I recently put together an XT computer out of spare parts I had
lying around, and ended up with a rather weird disk configuration. I
had this old 12 Meg MEMOREX disk drive sitting on the shelf for a
number of years, which had 6 heads and 240 cylinders. The closest
drive table entry on the XT controller was 6 heads and 400 cylinders.
I was able to use the drive by doing a partial format of only the
first 240 cylinders, and establishing a primary DOS partition (using
FDISK) which was only 240 cylinders in size. Thus, although the
system thought it was a 400 cylinder drive, it never had any reason
to attempt access to the cylinders which were not physically present.
All of the above worked perfectly, until I tried to park the
drive.... BUZZZZ... (Insert the sound of a head actuator banging
against the drive stop about 160 times).
Since I had run into similar situations (particularily on XT's)
where I didn't always have a park utility which put the heads away
where I wanted, I decided to solve the problem once and for all, and
sat down and wrote the PARK.COM program described on the following
pages.
The source code to PARK is provided in the file PARK.C, and may be
re-compiled using my MICRO-C compiler (See enclosed CATALOG file). It
MUST be complied in TINY model, which allows it to easily write out
an updated copy of itself (See '-s' option).
The program may be freely used and distributed, provided that my
copyright notices are not removed or altered.
Configurable Park Utility Page: 2
2. PARK.COM
The PARK.COM program supplied in this archive allows you to
specify the number of hard drives to park, and the cylinder number at
which to park each drive.
In its simplest form, the PARK command consists of one decimal
operand for each drive in the system, which is the cylinder number at
which to park the drive. If you specify a cylinder number of 0
(zero), the highest cylinder number for that drive as reported by
BIOS is used:
PARK 0 ; Park drive C at highest known cylinder
PARK 240 ; Park drive C at cylinder 240
PARK 240 0 ; Park drive C at 240, drive D at highest
PARK 240 400 ; Park drive C at 240, drive D at 400
If the BIOS does not acknowledge the existance of a drive, it will
be ignored. The last two examples above would be equivalent to "PARK
240" on a single drive system.
PARK.COM supports a '-s' option, which causes it to write a new
PARK.COM which defaults to the remaining options. Executing PARK with
no arguments will PARK at these default settings:
PARK -s 240 0 ; Save the settings
PARK ; Park drive C at 240, drive D at highest
You may see the currently defined default settings by executing
PARK with the '-s' option, and no other arguments:
PARK -s ; Display the default settings
The PARK.COM program supplied in this archive is defaulted to TWO
drives, both of which are parked at the highest cylinder number
indicated by BIOS. This is equivalent to:
PARK -s 0 0 ; Default to drive C+D, highest cylinder
PARK will display a brief help summary if you give it an operand
of '?' or '-?'.
PARK ? ; Display usage info
Configurable Park Utility
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
1. INTRODUCTION 1
2. PARK.COM 2