rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) (02/24/90)
I have done such a thing: Wren VI drive, officially up to 701 MB capacity, if low-formatted with 1024byte sectors. Unforunately it is preformatted with 512 Bytes. Therefore we only managed to get 630 out of this drive. If ppl are interested I can post the disktab entries we used. But they are certainly suboptimal, as we just copied the Maxtor entries and changed as little as possible. (e.g formatting results in a warning that not all sectors in the last cylinder are used and such...) So the file should be fine-tuned. We didn't do it yet, as we still hope that someone out there has a low-level scsi-drive formatter. If there is such a thing we would highly appreciate if you could tell us about it. The very idea that there are at least some 60 MBytes unused :((( Ronald ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet
rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) (02/24/90)
According to popular demand I "Post that sucker" of disktab entry: CDC 94191-15|CDC 94191-15-1024|CDC 766MB w/1024 byte sectors:\ :ty=fixed_rw_scsi:nc#1632:nt#15:ns#28:ss#1024:rm#3600:\ :fp#160:bp#0:ng#0:gs#0:ga#0:ao#0:\ :os=sdmach:z0#32:z1#96:ro=a:\ :pa#0:sa#422520:ba#8192:fa#1024:ca#32:da#4096:ra#10:oa=space:\ :ia:ta=4.3BSD:\ :pb#422520:sb#225245:bb#8192:fb#1024:cb#32:db#8192:rb#10:ob=space:\ :ib:tb=4.3BSD: Note however the following: - we installed the systems in the following manner: 1) boot with the OD-40MB-swap configuration 2) edit fstab to get rid of the entry for the swapdrive 3) reboot, the rc.swap is set up so that it should automatically create a swapfile on the optical disk Thigs are slow now, as you are swapping to the OD 4) edit the disktab file (add this entry) 5) power down 6) remove the swapdrive 7) set the SCSI-dev. number on the wren vi to 1 8) put the drive into the cube 9) reboot 10) run builddisk on the harddisk 11) set bootdevice to harddisk in the preferences 12) reboot (this time from the harddisk) This did work for 2 of our 3 NeXT's the 3rd one has still Problems, it stops booting on the scsi disk. if I go into the monitor and issue the bsd command, the same, after the message where it gives the ROM version number it stops booting. The interesting thing is, that if I insert a optical disk into the drive, and do again a bsd (YES, bsd not bod) then it boots flawlessly from the scsi-disk. After the system is up it prompts me for automounting of the optical disk, the whole system works well until I try to unmount the optical disk, in which case the system halts. However it swaps to the harddisk, boots from the harddisk, all the cables are in the right place, as is the scsi-address of the scsi drive. NeXT does not know an answer, they just keep telling me that I should check the cables and that it is a unsupported configuration... It looks like a hardware failure, just they dont want to believe it, well I'll see. Has anyone seen something like this before? Ronald ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet
rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) (02/24/90)
Has anyone tried to use the cache-on programm which was posted a while ago for wren v drives on a wren vi? Does it work? Has anyone seen a lowlevel format program for some other machines I have access to (SUN, Mac)? Diskmanager on the mac is of ne use, as it does not allow you to change the block size of the lowlevel format. Ronald ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet