[comp.sys.sun] Two disks on XY 753?

brian@natinst.com (Brian H. Powell) (04/25/89)

We've had a Fuji M2372K disk hooked up to a xylogics 753 for our Sun 3/160
for several months.  I'm trying to add a second disk to the controller.
I've daisy-chained the disks, so it's Sun<->old-disk<->new-disk.
Everything's hooked up and works sort-of okay, but there's a couple of
things that are bothering me.

First, while formatting it (under SunOS instead of MUNIX!!!), "format"
complained that the disk wasn't set up for sector slipping.  I didn't find
anything in the Fuji or Xylogics documentation on how to set that up.  (I
formatted the first Fuji disk as part of the SunOS 4 installation, and I
don't recall anything peculiar back then.)  What am I doing wrong?

Anyway, I managed to get the disk formatted and newfs'd, and when I use
it, I run into the second problem.  I tried to copy about 100 Megabytes of
files to the new disk with:

	tar cf - <old-partition> | (cd <new-partition> ; tar xfBp -)

and the system froze.  Froze, that is, except for the copying of files.

Aside: This reminded me of when I was formatting it.  "Format" told me it
would take 12 minutes to format the drive.  It sure did, and _nothing_,
other than the format, took place during those 12 minutes.  (Such
terminals responding, screensaver waking up...)  After 12 minutes,
everything resumed pretty much as normal.

Anyway, when I tried to tar the files over to the new partition, several
megabytes copied, and then the system evidently crashed.  (It's hard to
tell the difference between a frozen system and a crashed system.)

I'm hoping that this freeze-out is not the standard mode of operation for
two disks on a Xy 753.  Perhaps someone can tell me that I'm doing
something wrong and how to fix it.  Otherwise, it looks like we just
wasted several thousand dollars.  Thanks in advance.

Brian H. Powell					National Instruments Corp.
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