wrp@biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson) (06/07/91)
I have been puzzled by the recent discussion about using non-Apple disks with AUX. I am planning on purchasing a 210 Mbyte Quantum disk that will be dedicated to AUX 2.01. The latter will be purchased on CD-ROM. The question: do I need to purchase Silverlining, or something like it? The new disk will have nothing but AUX on it (or perhaps a little MacOS to boot from?). Will I be able to run the AUX partitioning utilities without installing AUX so that I can run from the new non-Apple disk? Contrary to several comments about non-Apple disks, many unix manufacturers make it easy both to format and partition third-party disks. It is my understanding that "formatting" a SCSI-disk is very standard, and usually unnecessary. It seems to be very simple to modify HD-Setup to "recognize" non-Apple disks (after a quick look with SCSI-probe). Once the disk is recognized, will HD-Setup do whatever necessary, or are there additional tables in HD-Setup (in addition to the vendor's product name) that must be changed? Bill Pearson
sysmark@aurora.physics.utoronto.ca (Mark Bartelt) (06/07/91)
[ me ] | Granted that *formatting* is (or, at least, can be) very drive-specific. But | I don't understand why partitioning can't be supported for all drives. [ ... ] | It's my impression that HD SC Setup sniffs the drive, notices that it isn't an | Apple drive, and refuses to deal with it in any way, even though it could, if | it wanted to, do things like define the partitions. [ Bill Pearson ] | Contrary to several comments about non-Apple disks, many unix | manufacturers make it easy both to format and partition third-party disks. | It is my understanding that "formatting" a SCSI-disk is very standard, Yes, thanks for the correction. My brain must have been in SMD mode rather then SCSI mode when I made the above comment about formatting possibly being problematical. [ Kent Sandvik ] | Well, here we go again. Let me give another example of how hard it is to support | third party vendor SCSI disks. The general assumption is that a hard disk should | start with asynchonous mode, and start a form of handshaking talking with the other | end if they want synchronous mode, and at what speeds. | | Well, there are hard disks out there that maybe or possibly starts immediately in | synchronous mode, and wonders why the Mac does not talk with them. A disk that behaves that way is broken. Unless I'm mistaken (if so, please correct me), the async/sync negotiation is part of the SCSI *standard*, not just a "general assumption". A drive that starts out in synchronous mode without getting an OK from the other end isn't following the standard, and its manufacturer should be loudly screamed at. I don't think any rational customer would fault Apple for not being able to deal with a drive which violates the SCSI spec! | If we said that | HD Setup would work with *any* hard disk, and a customer gets into trouble to a similar | case, then we are liable. We don't expect you to promise to support *any* hard disk. At least, not disks which don't conform to the SCSI spec. But it would be nice if you *did* support well-behaved drives. Note that you don't really even *have* to guarantee that you will: Other vendors, recognizing that people want to plug Brand X disks into their systems, provide support for generic SCSI devices, while also providing themselves an escape hatch in the form of a disclaimer which says that they can't guarantee that arbitrary devices which they themselves do not sell will actually work. In practice, this approach works just fine. *All* of our other UNIX boxes are capable of formatting, partitioning, and happily using a wide variety of SCSI drives. Sun does it, SGI does it, DEC does it ... Apple could, too, if they really wanted to. But instead, it seems (again, correct me if I'm wrong) that HD SC Setup will refuse to even try to partition the drive unless it first recognizes it as an Apple-supplied drive. | Anyway, things are happening, so let's see what next year | will bring. Looking forward to some major improvements, in this area and in others ... Mark Bartelt 416/978-5619 Canadian Institute for mark@cita.toronto.edu Theoretical Astrophysics mark@cita.utoronto.ca
alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) (06/08/91)
Guys, could we please not hash this whole thing out again? We beat up the
Apple folks enough on this one. Let's beat them up over tape drives instead.
To recapitulate last month's discussion, several Apple people stated that it
was a known problem and that they were going to deal with it in a big way,
almost certainly in the next version. I still don't like it but bitching
about it won't help, so why waste the energy?
On the other hand, we _still_ don't have even a hint that the tape issue is
being addressed. More on that in another note... :-(
---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
alexis@panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexisksand@apple.com (Kent Sandvik) (06/08/91)
In article <1991Jun6.233139.11192@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, wrp@biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson) writes: > > > I have been puzzled by the recent discussion about using non-Apple > disks with AUX. I am planning on purchasing a 210 Mbyte Quantum disk > that will be dedicated to AUX 2.01. The latter will be purchased on CD-ROM. > The question: do I need to purchase Silverlining, or something like it? > The new disk will have nothing but AUX on it (or perhaps a little MacOS > to boot from?). Will I be able to run the AUX partitioning utilities > without installing AUX so that I can run from the new non-Apple disk? > > Contrary to several comments about non-Apple disks, many unix > manufacturers make it easy both to format and partition third-party disks. > It is my understanding that "formatting" a SCSI-disk is very standard, > and usually unnecessary. It seems to be very simple to modify HD-Setup to > "recognize" non-Apple disks (after a quick look with SCSI-probe). Once > the disk is recognized, will HD-Setup do whatever necessary, or are there > additional tables in HD-Setup (in addition to the vendor's product name) > that must be changed? It was once easy to modify HD Setup :-) - it's a little bit more awkward nowadays. The formatting of SCSI disks are as you say standard. It is the partitioning side that is the tricky thing. Most modern and good non-Apple hard disk partitioning programs, such as Silverlining, are capable of producing good working partition maps that the installation program and A/UX in general recognizes. I once thought that SCSI was standard, but the transport side is one issue, and the partitioning side is a totally another thing, and as in UNIX in general each vendor has their own ideas of partitioning systems. I remember good old NCR UNIX partitions, where you could easily generate overlapping partitions, because the partitioning program wanted to make 512-byte sized partitions and increased values behind your back... So HD Setup is heaven for me :-), especially compared with a session with Aries UNIX system partitioning, or Tahoe partitioning... Kent Sandvik
ksand@apple.com (Kent Sandvik) (06/09/91)
In article <1991Jun7.100146.20572@helios.physics.utoronto.ca>, sysmark@aurora.physics.utoronto.ca (Mark Bartelt) writes: > [ Kent Sandvik ] > > | Well, here we go again. Let me give another example of how hard it is to support > | third party vendor SCSI disks. The general assumption is that a hard disk should > | start with asynchonous mode, and start a form of handshaking talking with the other > | end if they want synchronous mode, and at what speeds. > | > | Well, there are hard disks out there that maybe or possibly starts immediately in > | synchronous mode, and wonders why the Mac does not talk with them. > > A disk that behaves that way is broken. Unless I'm mistaken (if so, please > correct me), the async/sync negotiation is part of the SCSI *standard*, not > just a "general assumption". A drive that starts out in synchronous mode > without getting an OK from the other end isn't following the standard, and > its manufacturer should be loudly screamed at. I don't think any rational > customer would fault Apple for not being able to deal with a drive which > violates the SCSI spec! The problem is the definition of a 'rational customer' - I don't think there are many customers that know the SCSI specs inside out. > | If we said that > | HD Setup would work with *any* hard disk, and a customer gets into trouble to a similar > | case, then we are liable. > > We don't expect you to promise to support *any* hard disk. At least, not > disks which don't conform to the SCSI spec. But it would be nice if you > *did* support well-behaved drives. This is the problem, it is hard to define the line where the 'well-behaved SCSI disk set' starts and the bad guy SCSI disks ends. Anyway, I'm afraid this will lead to another round of SCSI hard disk A/UX bashing, so I will stop talking about this thing :-). Kent