wds@tuck.fit.edu (William D. Shoaff) (10/06/89)
We have experienced problems trying to format a CDC Wren IV 94171-344 under 4.0.3 on a Sun 3/50. We went with the info in the format.dat file, not changing anything. When we ran format, it said the disk was formatted, but no defect list was found, using original we committed the manufacturer's list, and decided to label the drive (it was supposely formatted). Label failed with write errors on cyl 1546. We then decided we had better format it, but it hung on the verify pass. Having experienced similar problems with a Wren V, we took the drive upstairs to a 3.5 machine, where we succeeded in formatting and creating file systems, but only after dropping back to about 1400 cyls. Brought the drive back to the 4.0.3 machine and tried fsck. No luck! Any ideas what we did wrong? More importantly, any ideas on how to get the drive working? Thanks in advance. wds@zach.fit.edu William D. Shoaff Dept. of Computer Science Florida Institute of Technology Melbourne, Florida 32901 (407) 768-8000 8066
dna@shire.psu.edu (Douglas N. Arnold) (10/15/89)
William D. Shoaff writes >> We have experienced problems trying to format a CDC Wren IV >> 94171-344 under 4.0.3 on a Sun 3/50. We went with the info in the >> format.dat file, not changing anything. When we ran format, it said >> the disk was formatted, but no defect list was found, using original >> we committed the manufacturer's list, and decided to label the drive >> (it was supposely formatted). Label failed with write errors on cyl >> 1546. We then decided we had better format it, but it hung on the >> verify pass. I had a similar experience trying to format a CDC Wren IV 94171 on a SPARCStation 1 running 4.0.3. The format.dat entry provided didn't work. I did a lot of reading of back issues of Sun-Spots, and a fair amount of trial and error and came up with 1356 cylinders, 2 alternate cylinders, 1362 physical cylinders, 9 heads, 48 sectors per track That comes to 585,792 sectors, or 299,925,504 bytes. Since the OEM manual that came with the disk says that "Model 94171 has a factory formatted storage capacity of 298 megabytes", I figured I didn't do too bad. I don't feel comfortable with the way I arrived at these numbers, but I have been using the disk for about 2 weeks and everything seems to work. A general question to people out there who know: ISN'T THERE A BETTER WAY? I've gone through this twice, once with a Wren IV and once with a Wren V, and both times I've arrived at the formatting data basically by guess work. From reading Sun-Spots, I see that I'm not alone. By the way, I partitioned the disk into a root partition of 45 cylinders, a /usr partition of 1167 cylinders, and a swap partition of 144 cylinders. This works out to 32 MB of swap, and after making the filesystems, 9 MB + 236 MB in the two partitions. dna@fredholm.psu.edu Douglas N. Arnold Department of Mathematics The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802