mack@uunet.uu.net (Dave Mack) (04/24/89)
I recently bought a pair of NDR3380 SCSI drives in the hope of installing them in my Sun-2/120. I've been having a little trouble and would appreciate any advice. I'm running 3.2 on my Sun. The installation package knows about two types of disk controllers: the Adaptec ACB-4000 (SCSI-ST506) and the Emulex MD-21 (ESDI). I'm currently running the Adaptec. Since the NDR3380 controller is a SCSI-RLL job, I hoped that I could hook it up directly to the SCSI bus and pretend that it was an Emulex. I attempted to load the OS from tape using the standard installation procedures and the configuration specified by NDR for the disk. I was able to format and scan the disk (with intermittent SCSI tape errors st: error 9088), partition, and dump miniUnix onto the 'b' partition. When setup tried to rewrite the partition data, the system locked up. I rebooted and restarted the installation from scratch. It failed to pass the surface scan repeatedly, but diag was unable to find any bad blocks through read/write. One possible explanation for the problems: the NDR controller reserves track 0 of the disk for storage of controller parameters. These parameters are written to disk every time a SCSI mode select is done with the proper data. The SunOS SCSI disk driver (presumably including the PROM version) expects to find the partitioning data on track 0. The NDR controller may be overwriting the partition data every so often. According to NDR, there is no way to prevent the controller from writing on track 0. I'm not sure if there's a workaround in SunOS, but I'm dubious. I'm a total neophyte in the hardware world. Has anyone else gotten one of these beasts to run in a Sun? Do I need an Emulex controller? Is there any way to tell SunOS to look for its partition data somewhere else? Am I out of luck? Thanks very much, Dave Mack uunet!inco!mack