mdm@wdl40.wdl.loral.com (Mike D Marchionna) (05/25/91)
Well I really did it to myself this time. After almost two months of waiting I finally received my 2.0 OD. A few months back I had purchased a third party Maxtor XT-8760S drive and installed it in my cube. It worked fine except that it was formatted with 512 byte sectors. Before upgrading to NS 2.0 I decided two try and reformat my drive to 1024 byte sectors using Mr. Bolts' formatter program version 1.2. I booted from my 1.0 OD and ran the formatter program. The format procedure took about 40 minutes and completed without any errors. I then rebooted with the my 2.0 OD and tried to perform a Builddisk on my freshly formatted drive. This is when the trouble started. Builddisk found the drive fine and reported it as a Maxtor XT-8760S-1024. I then got several informational messages telling me it was performing a 658MB build. Almost immediately I got a Warning message telling me that Builddisk was unable to use 4096 byte i-nodes, and would use 5000 something i-nodes instead. It also suggested I try to reduce the cluster page group size. This didn't bode well as I watched in horror as Builddisk continued along writing super blocks. It continued right up to the point where it tried to make the file system for the "a" partition. Builddisk reported that there were N blocks in this partition and then quickly crapped out after the "newfs" command with a message like: "wtfs: error N-1". At this point Builddisk gave up the ghost. Alright I thought. Maybe the "formatter" program used a strange format layout. It at least seemed to get the sector size to 1024 byte sectors. So I tried /usr/etc/sdform. It ran through its format procedure without an error. I then retried the Builddisk tool, and came up with the same results. After it failed I retried the Builddisk again. This time I got a dialog box asking if I wanted one partition or two. I selected one partition and started the Builddisk procedure. I got the same i-node warning as the two previous attempts. The only difference was that this time it said there were M blocks in this partition and the "newfs" command failed with a message: "wtfs: Error M-1". I ran /usr/etc/scsimodes and /usr/etc/disk both reported reasonable data. The disk utility seemed to be able to write to the blocks that newfs complained about. Does any of this sound familiar to anybody? I need some help. I sort of remember someone having drive difficulties similar to this where they were unable to get newfs to write to the last block in the partition. I don't have many options left to try, and I was hoping the kind soles in comp.sys.next could impart some wisdom on me before I go and screw things up even further. I realize the information I've given is a little vague, but I was too depressed late last night to save all the data to include it in this post. I'll try and repost with more info if nobody can infer anything from this description. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance to anyone giving the time respond. M MDM mdm@wdl1.wdl.loral.com M -- _________________________________________________________________________ ( _______________________________ Brain, and brain! What is brain! ) \________________________________) --Star Trek (Spock's Brain) / El_Rayo_X_______________________________________________________________/