Back in the days of the first DEC storage works systems (F220?), I had a quandry. Our system was loaded with 2GB drives, but I happened to have a bunch of 4GB (DEC RZ29B) storage works drives from an array attached to an alpha system. NetApp never qualified the RZ29B drives. The 4GB drives at that time were from Seagate. Being an enterprising systems person, I decided to figure out why the software wouldn't recognize the RZ29B drives. In both the boot and the OS code there was/is a table with the drive info. This was used for the rightsizing of the drives (i.e. the DEC RZ29B with 4.2GB was mapped to 4.0GB, etc.). I figured that if I broke out my trusty emacs on both binaries (boot and OS) and changed the SEAGATE id string to a DEC id string, I could get the 4GB drives running. It worked, although my configuration wasn't exactly supported. I'm amazed that Roy Kumar put up with me :-) For those of you who are new, Roy seemed to be the 24x7 tech support person back in 1994. Whenever we had any problems Roy was the man who answered the phone.
Barry Lustig