I've been one to learn that one must have patience at times when
dealing with certain operations to complete, but I think this time my
patience is probably a waste of time.

I was able to salvage some old Sun equipment before it went into the
trash: a Sparc 20, some external drives (Seagate), monitors, et
cetera. I was able to fully populate the SS20 with 64MB DIMMs, and I
have it up and running with Solaris 9 and all the latest MaintUpdate
and Sec/Rec patches as of morning 10 July. I have no BIG
plans/expectations of a SS20 (compared to today's much faster and
advanced technology), but, hey, it still allows me to try out
different things at home so that I don't screw up things at work on
the PrimePowers.

One of the external disks that I have is an external Seagate ST11200N.
The system sees it, but as a "drive type unknown". I did a
format/type and entered in the following:

2036 cyclinders
2 alternate
2038 total
14 heads
72 sectors
5400 RPM
and saved it with a name as "ST11200N"

I also see that another entry exists in there for "SUN1.05" which
gives the same parameters. When I'm done saving it off, it also comes
back with "disk not formatted". This makes sense since it could be
that the company completely took care of ensuring all sensitive info
was gone/inaccessible.

My real situation/question is this.....when I then try to do a
format/format, it comes back with "Are you sure...cannot be
interrupted" to which I answer "yes" and [ENTER], then then it says
"Formatting...".

I assume that it is doing so.....but it is taking an extremely long
time. I started at 10:00am Saturday morning and it is still
continuing on through 7:00am Sunday morning (now 21 hours). Even with
it being an old SS20, I can't see a 1.05Gb disk taking over 21 hours
to reformat. Obviously, I can't do anything else (i.e.
format/analyze) without the disk being first formatted.

Should I just chalk this one up wo being toast?

Richard