penrose@gymer.css.gov (Christopher Penrose) (08/08/90)
Someone asked for Maxtor LXT200S information. I know your situation. Of the five we ordered, only four managed to arrive with cables. I managed to pry jumper and format information from [& a taco]. Here is a write up that I made for my boss. Just for the record, I have installed only one of these drives so far (on a 4/65) and just last night it forgot how to read its label. Just before we attempted to reformat the drive, the label became readable again. Strange tempermental magic. Except for this dive, our Ada folks have been quite happy with it. Christopher Penrose penrose@essosun.css.gov ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Here is a scoop. The physical installation procedures for the Maxtor drives are adequately described within the enclosed (inside the box--hopefully) documentation. [& a taco] did forget some other important details--but, they remembered the drive! No! that foil shrouded hunk is not a loaf of black bread. The drives have five jumpers. Find them! With the SCSI connectors of the drive oriented upward, the jumpers should be near the top. If you don't find these five jumpers here, you probably aren't holding a Maxtor LXT200S in your palm. You might be holding a bag of snail death instead. Ignore the top two jumpers, they are to remain unchanged. The bottom three jumpers allow you to specify the SCSI id number for the drive. Starting from the bottom jumper the three jumpers correspond to a 3-bit number which specifies the actual SCSI id. Without jumpers, the address is sd0, with only the bottom jumper complete we have sd1. Please extend this logic. Formatting! Your Sparcstation does not know what a Maxtor LXT200S is. You need to teach 'format' how to recognize these orphans. Pull up 'format' from a trusty shell on your Sparcstation and select the SCSI device that corresponds with the SCSI id that you chose. Format will whine about the disk (being quite the xenophobe) being unrecognized. Extract/create a defect list and then format the drive. The formatting will not begin immediately: first you will be asked for some arcane knowledge. cylinders: 1312 heads: 7 extra cylns: 2 sectors per track: 41 rpm: 3600 bpt: 23520 'format' should be happy after it gets this information. The installation may even finish quickly.