carlo@gaia.gcs.oz.au (Carlo Kopp) (11/16/90)
I am looking for advice on the configuration of the CDC Sabre 850 when run with a Xylogics 753 or 7053 installed on a Sun 3 or 4 running 4.0.3 or 4.1. We have had an interesting situation with a customer site (4/260 4.0.3 7053) which reported continuing problems with its 850s, these devices were repeatedly replaced and the problems still recurred. Finally, we installed one of the 'suspect' 850s on a Solbourne 4/602 4.0D with a 753 and ran it, much to our surprise it performed flawlessly. When we installed the drive on a 3/160 running 4.1 with a 753 it failed almost immediately with assorted media errors, returned to the Solbourne it again performed flawlessly. We suspect that the problem arises due to some aspect of the drive's behaviour not agreeing with Sun's implementation of the 7053/753 SMD driver, probably as a result of the drive being configured in a way which falls outside of the 'envelope' of workable Sabre/753/driver configurations. Does anybody have any material which documents the limitations of the driver used, and also does anybody have a set of known reliably working configurations for the Sabre under these conditions (ie drive switch settings and format parameters)? I would be grateful for any advice on this matter (Sun's are not my daily occupation) and I am quite happy to publish a summary of the results once this is resolved. carlo@gaia.gcs.oz.au (Carlo Kopp, Solbourne Computer Australia)
berger@atropa.stat.uiuc.edu (Dire Wolf) (11/28/90)
I don't know the specifics of running a CDC Sabre-850 on the 7053 controller, but I have three of them on Xylogics 451's and Ciprico Rimfire 3224's. Try different "tag" types for extended cylinder addressing. Also, be sure that you're allowing enough bits/sector for your controller type. Reformatting a disk to use a slightly different sector size can result in the messages you saw, and it will require a lot of time and patience to reformat. Mike Berger Department of Statistics, University of Illinois AT&TNET 217-244-6067 Internet berger@atropa.stat.uiuc.edu