david@llustig.uucp (David Schachter) (02/22/90)
My system includes a WD1007 disk controller and two drives. The first drive, which has been working well, if slowly, since it was installed, is a Micropolis 1355. The system is an Everex Step 386/20, 4MB RAM, running XENIX V R2.3.2. Question: The first drive shows as 1023 cylinders, 16 heads, 17 sectors per track. Of course it has 8 heads and 34 (or possibly 35) sectors per track, with the controller translating. (35 SPT if the disk was formatted with a spare sector. I believe this would cause most disk flaws to be invisble to XENIX as the controller maps them to the spare sector. Right? Or does XENIX still see them, and badtrk maps 'em out?) Is this configuration losing performance? Should I reformat and disable translation to return to 1023 cyl., 8 heads, 34|35 SPT? Other question: the second drive I installed last night is a Fujitsu MK2244E, 823 cylinders, 5 heads, 34 (or 35) sectors per track. I used the WD BIOS extension to format and surface-analyze the disk, then XENIX utilities to use the entire disk for a XENIX partition as the disk 1 on controller 0, and manually created the filesystem with 40000 inodes, instead of the default ~15K inodes, so it will hold lots of small files. (And I manually created the lost+ +found directory and put a bunch of files in it and deleted them.) Basically, I followed the instructions in the XENIX documention until the mkfs step and then followed USENET instructions for choosing inode capacity (which is mostly a manual execution with modest variations of the /usr/lib/mkdev/fs script.) The drive mounts fine, df is happy, and I can create files on it and read them back. But when I try to copy a lot of stuff to it (the news spool area, for example,) it churns away for a bit, copying files, and then hangs. Hangs the whole system, in fact. The drive selected light stays on, I can't login or execute any disk-based commands (as opposed to csh builtins) and the system must be reset and rebooted. Any ideas what is wrong? I didn't enter the manufacturer's defect list to badtrk, as I presumed the WD BIOS surface analysis routine mapped those defects out when I entered the list to it. I.e., I assumed XENIX wouldn't see the defects because the defect list no longer corresponded to XENIX's view of the disk. One stupidity up front: I haven't installed xnx133 yet, the WD1007 fix. I'm not entirely sure what it does. Perhaps if I do, the problem will go away? Does anyone know what xnx133 does? If anyone cares, I HAVE been reading recent traffic in this newsgroup on the subject of disks and controllers, and I HAVE been reading the manuals, and the controller documentation and disk drive documentation, and I'm not entirely stupid, only mostly. -- David Schachter llustig!david@mips.com OR MAYBE david@llustig.uucp +1 415 328 7425
david@llustig.uucp (David Schachter) (02/24/90)
In article <1990Feb22.070517.837@llustig.uucp> david@llustig.uucp (David Schachter) writes: >My system includes a WD1007 disk controller and two drives. The first drive, >which has been working well, if slowly, since it was installed, is a Micropolis >1355. The system is an Everex Step 386/20, 4MB RAM, running XENIX V R2.3.2. [The second drive is a Fujitsu MK2244E, 823 cylinders, 5 heads, 35 SPT.] > >When I try to copy a lot of stuff to [the 2nd drive] (the news spool area, for >example,) it churns away for a bit, copying files, and then hangs. Hangs the >whole system, in fact. The drive selected light stays on, I can't login or >execute any disk-based commands (as opposed to csh builtins) and the system >must be reset and rebooted. > >Any ideas what is wrong? I didn't enter the manufacturer's defect list to >badtrk, as I presumed the WD BIOS surface analysis routine mapped those defects >out when I entered the list to it. I.e., I assumed XENIX wouldn't see the >defects because the defect list no longer corresponded to XENIX's view of the >disk. > >One stupidity up front: I haven't installed xnx133 yet, the WD1007 fix. I'm >not entirely sure what it does. Perhaps if I do, the problem will go away? >Does anyone know what xnx133 does? An update: I installed xnx133 and the system no longer hangs! Now it displays neatly formatted gibberish. Well, not really. It now displays error messages as described in the (HW) man page for 'hd', while it re-tries over and over. The system must be rebooted anyway, because neither drive works once the symptom occurs; attempts to access either drive cause the repeated error messages. I've requested WD1007 documentation to figure out what the error messages mean when they say that commands 20 and 30 failed with status 5110. I'll reset and reformat the disk for 34 sectors per track, translation to 17, no sparing, and let XENIX handle the bad tracks, and see what happens. -- David Schachter llustig!david@mips.com OR MAYBE david@llustig.uucp +1 415 328 7425