drh@spock.uucp (D. Ryan Hawley) (02/16/88)
Hi Gang,
I feel I owe it to this alias to tell you about the pain I've
experienced, and how to avoid it (I think). I made a glaring
mistake when setting up my harddisk, which combined with (
what I think was hardware interrupts) from the SDSI 8 MB board
was very hostile to my sanity.
To anyone who has set up an ST506 (IBM style) hard disk you can
skip this paragraph. Using the software that comes with the
Amiga 2090 (I'm a bit fuzzy on random numbers, hope I got these
all right!) controller is not "super easy" here are a few tips.
There are some files on the HD installation disk called something
like "hdinstall[0-3]" or "installhard[0-3]". I would recomend
renaming the xxxxxx1 & xxxxxx2 versions (if you are installing
one ST506 drive with 1 partition) because they will overwrite
your df0:/devs/mountlist file with a second partition you don't
want! Make two zero length files with the same names.
Make sure that you connect the middle connector (of the ribbon
cable, between the controller and the disk drive) {neither the
controller nor the disk will come with a cable anyway}. The end
connector is for drive 1 (not drive 0).
Most Important of all!!!!!:
The first two cylinders of the disk are reserved for header info,
and spare blocks (to replace bad blocks). They are called RES0:
and you MUST make the buffers "1" or some other low number. I
set mine to 32, because I wanted the large partition I was going
to use to have a nice large computer sized buffer. You will be
asked what size buffers you want the main partition to be during
the "prep" command. My disk problems (which caused me to format
my drive 3 times in 2 weeks, (YUCK!!!!!) were caused by my header
info not being written to disk (still theory, but I'm assiging a
high probability factor).
Lastly, I couldn't get the disk to format it kept blowing up in
the middle (not near the beginning of course) with random GURU
MEDITIATION errors (usually 00000003, & 00000004, 0000000B) the
problem was my 8 MB SDSI board! I took the board out and it
formatted just fine! DAMN! I was very carefull when installing
the chips on the board, and ran the tests many times, it checked
out, but creates these random errors not only during format, but
at random times. I thought the Amiga was the most flakey multitasking
machine I'd ever seen (forgive me Commodore), because of all the
damn GURU MEDITATION errors I got, but since I removed the
supposedly fine SDSI board they went away!
If anyone has any better experiences with the SDSI board please
let me know. I'm not really anxious to return it, and would like
to make it work out. I might try to replace it with 2 MB's
installed and see how it works. My roomate thought it might need
to be grounded?? If anyone has any thoughts about this (such as
ground what wire to which place) let me know.
D.R. Hawley, Sun Microsystems, 408+945-3260
Please send mail directly to me, as well as the news group if
possible.bilbo@pnet02.cts.com (Bill Daggett) (02/17/88)
Supra recommends removing all cards, especially RAM cards when formating their
drives - so this problem doesn't seem to be unique. Their answer to my
puzzling question - WHY? is/was that all the RAM chips may not be going to a
zero state and blah blah blah... something about this being necessary for the
format process to work correctly. It was really all over my head but I'm not
sure I buy it anyway. They also strongely recommended that you turn the
machine OFF for 10 minutes before the format process and 10 minutes after the
format process for this same interesting zero state business. Well, what can
I say. I tried it and I thought things were better but it didn't last. For
nothing better to blame all my Guru's on I blame TAG and have given up the
board (after a "delete dh1:TAG all").
Bill
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