whitcomb@vivaldi.Berkeley.EDU (Gregg Whitcomb) (06/06/89)
Well, I decided to purchase the GVP A2000/2M/Ok controller and have some comments/questions: I also purchased a ST277N drive. The first drive I received passed the "low-level format SFORMAT" step in the GVP installation setup. However, the amigados format command bombed out early on during the first partition format. I was able to try different partitions and get it to somewhat work, although not to my satisfaction (I ordered the drive from ComputAbility). I contacted both ComputAbility and GVP. ComputAbility said that the GVP software should have remapped the bad blocks (apparently the trumpcard s/w does) and GVP said that the Seagate drive firmware did not do its job during the low-level format. I sent the drive back, and $17 worth of postage later received another ST277N drive. This one worked. (well, the amigados format command did bomb out on one partition, but trying it again it passed okay). comments: The GVP installation software is automatic (if you don't have problems or want to do something different than their fixed procedure). Unfortunately, the GVPprepHD program (no source provided) asks how many partitions you want and their respective size (in megabytes) and then generates the mountlist entries and I believe copies this information to the drive it a special place (any details on this). Anyway, this is okay except that it doesn't utilize all the cylinders on the drive. I noticed about 7 unused cylinders after looking at the mountlist entries. My guess is that the prep program is rounding off the "max size" for the current partition as you enter in the desired partition sizes. That is, it starts out reporting 61.74M max size (or something like that) which is not the exact amount. Has anyone experienced this problem and has been able to set up partitions which fully utilize the drive? (okay, so 80K lost isn't that significant when you have 62M, but what happens when you setup a 1G drive?) At least they could provide for more advanced users: source code for installation programs (they're selling the hardware, not the software!), prompting for cylinder counts instead of megabyte sizes, etc. -Gregg Whitcomb (whitcomb@ic.berkeley.edu)
bvk@hhb.UUCP (Brett Kuehner) (06/08/89)
In article <14376@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>, whitcomb@vivaldi.Berkeley.EDU (Gregg Whitcomb) writes: > Well, I decided to purchase the GVP A2000/2M/Ok controller and have > some comments/questions: > > I also purchased a ST277N drive. The first drive I received passed > the "low-level format SFORMAT" step in the GVP installation setup. > However, the amigados format command bombed out early on during the > first partition format. I was able to try different partitions and > get it to somewhat work, although not to my satisfaction (I ordered > the drive from ComputAbility). I contacted both ComputAbility and > GVP. ComputAbility said that the GVP software should have remapped > the bad blocks (apparently the trumpcard s/w does) and GVP said that > the Seagate drive firmware did not do its job during the low-level > format. I sent the drive back, and $17 worth of postage later > received another ST277N drive. This one worked. (well, the amigados > format command did bomb out on one partition, but trying it again > it passed okay). This is exactly the setup I have, and almost exactly the problems I've had. GVP claimed (in October) that they would eventually have a program or patch to handle bad block mapping, but I've not heard anything from them about it, and I call their BBS occasionally to see if there are any new developments. I still have a few cylinders that are unusable becuase of formatting errors, but other than an infrequent "read retry", I don't have any problems. I do wish I could map out the bad blocks, though. > > comments: > > The GVP installation software is automatic (if you don't have problems > or want to do something different than their fixed procedure). I have their older software (before autoboot and autoinstall) and I used that to play around with partitions to discover exactly where my bad blocks were. Unfortunately, I don't remember what I did to install that info in the autoboot info blocks (they are really called Rigid Disk Blocks, I think). It is possible to play around with mountlist parameters by giving an option to GVPPrepHD (I forget the option, but it has to be in upper case). Try a 'GVPPrepHD ?', and then try a few options, be careful not to trash your disk by changing partition sizes. > At least they could provide for more advanced users: source code for > installation programs (they're selling the hardware, not the software!), > prompting for cylinder counts instead of megabyte sizes, etc. > > > -Gregg Whitcomb (whitcomb@ic.berkeley.edu) I have the source to sformat, it came with my install disk, in the GVPscripts directory. The GVPPrepHD source would be nice, though. Brett -- Brett Kuehner, HHB Systems, Mawah, NJ ...!princeton!hhb!bvk bvk%hhb@princeton.EDU