Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 09:16:06 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org Cc: jon@vcnet.com (Jon Rust) Subject: Re: 2940 and large drives Message-ID: <199607200716.JAA03287@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <v03007808ae15e0f06977@[205.228.248.22]> from Jon Rust at "Jul 19, 96 06:17:19 pm"
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(This should have gone to freebsd-questions@freebsd.org.) As Jon Rust wrote: > the geometry. It hoses up my drives completely, and I have to do a low > level format before the drives are useful again. The install script aborts > when it tries to make a new fs on the hosed-up drives. Uh-oh, i hope you didn't _actually_ low-level format the drive. Low-level formatting a SCSI drive is something you only need if you have to reorganize the bad sector replacement table. All other cases are perfectly covered by either simply reinstalling and ignoring the pre-existing data, or at least by wiping out the first few blocks with zeros. > Ignored the message this time about bad geometry (after doing a low level > format on the drives). The install completes okay. Upon reboot I get a > message about "there is a drive larger than 1 gig with a 64 head/ 32 sector > partitioning which is not compatable with the 255 head/ 63 sector > translation setting on this card. Data could be corrupted. Hit any key to > .....". FreeBSD won't corrupt any data in this case, but might have problems to boot at all. Your system booted, so this was not a problem. > After hitting any key, the system comes up okay, but this obviously > is bad, as evidenced by my daily crashes where the computer reboots itself! Yeah, and herein lies the problem. You forgot to tell us how it crashes and what exactly happens. How should we know _why_ your machine crashed if your only sentence about it is ``daily crashes where the computer reboots itself''? > I turn OFF the option in the Adaptec for "extended BIOS for DOS-drives > larger than 1 gig" figuring maybe that option is ONLY for DOS drives. I It is only intended for stupid systems and always a good idea to turn it off. Infact, the BIOS is only used for booting in Linux or FreeBSD, and entirely ignored once the system comes up. The translation is only in effect while booting, since the BIOS doesn't provide a better abstraction of a disk than sectors, heads, and cylinders (without an unreasonably degraded number of bits available for each of them). Either SCSI as Unices provide the block number abstraction (also called LBA addressing), so no further translation happens other than adding an offset for the start of the slice and/or partition. > Also, what's the recommended process for adding scsi drives (formatting > them, partitioning them and making the new fs's)? The man page for fdisk is > pretty tough to follow, and disklabel's is even worse. I've often repeated my procedure in Usenet, but it's probably inadequate for you since it is a little ignorant about possible but non-existant (for me) foreign operating systems. (For one, i totally ignore fdisk, and go strictly on with labelling the disk.) /stand/sysinstall should be up to the task now, but wasn't that good for post-install maintenance back in 2.1. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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