On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Herb Peyerl wrote:

> All of those drives handled identification properly and reported
> correct geometry and size information.

The Western Digital ESDI controller in my 15-year-old Dell System 310 had
a BIOS setup tool--one typed 'g c800:5' or some sort of arcade game
nonsense in DEBUG.COM and this CLI popped up.  Among other things, one
could set fictitious geometries for the drive.  It was sort of like making
a role-playing character:  you kept hitting <SPACE> and it would make up
random geometries for you, followed by a question mark.


Choose a number of cylinders heads sectors emulation from the menu below.
569 cyl ,  37 sect ,   5 hd ,  ?

I'm not sure if these lies were told by the controller or the disk, but I
do remember reading some of Dell's (at that time) copious documentation
and thinking ``whaaat?  they did it _that_ way?'' so i'm leaning towards
that the lies were told by the _disk_.

-- 
Miles Nordin / 1-888-857-2723
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700