tep@suntan.west.sun.com (Tom Perrine) (02/07/90)
In Sun-Spots V9#14, Craig Hollabaugh asked about MAXTOR drives: |I am having problems formatting with the setup below. Any suggestions |would be greatly appreciated. | |Sun 3/260 with SunOS 4.0.3 Emulex MD21 disk controller Micropolis 1558 |(original disk) Maxtor XT8760E (additional disk) | |the Micropolis disk is the original drive that came with the Sun. It has |been working fine for 6 months. | |I am having problems formatting the Maxtor as an additional drive for our |system. We have been using MAXTOR XT4380Es (we have 14 or so) for some time in Sun-3/260s (SunOS 3.5.2). We also have one XT8760E in one of our machines. We are using Ciprico RimFire 3200 ESDI controllers. The problems we initially had with the 4380Es had to do with some switch settings on the drive. They came from the factory (or our OEM) with inconsistent settings; they were set with various combinations of hard vs. soft sectoring and several different flavors of bytes/sector. It was (almost) a case of no two drives having the same settings! There are switches on the drive which "declare" the number of bytes per sector and hard sectoring vs. soft sectoring. This MUST agree with the information you give to your formatting program. We got something called "rfutil" with the Ciprico contollers. We use hard sectoring only, we have never been able to reliably use soft sectoring. We have set up 4380Es with up to 35+1(spare) sectors/track. The 8760E we have is set up for 50+1(spare) sectors/track. On a machine with a 4380E as rf0 and a 8760E as rf1, dkinfo reports: rf0: Ciprico 3200 controller at addr 2000, unit # 0 1218 cylinders 15 heads 34 sectors/track ... rf1: Ciprico 3200 controller at addr 2000, unit # 2 1628 cylinders 15 heads 50 sectors/track Let me know if this helps. Tom Perrine (tep) Logicon (Tactical and Training Systems Division) San Diego CA (619) 455-1330 Internet: tots!tep@LOGICON.ARPA GENIE: T.PERRINE UUCP: nosc!hamachi!tots!tep -or- sun!suntan!tots!tep