From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Jan 26 18:58:32 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA12777 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 26 Jan 1997 18:58:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from bugs.us.dell.com (bugs.us.dell.com [143.166.169.147]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id SAA12766 for ; Sun, 26 Jan 1997 18:57:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from ant.us.dell.com (ant.us.dell.com [198.64.66.34]) by bugs.us.dell.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id UAA20141; Sun, 26 Jan 1997 20:56:21 -0600 Message-Id: <3.0.1.32.19970126205619.00684ee4@bugs.us.dell.com> X-Sender: tony@bugs.us.dell.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.1 beta 7 (32) Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1997 20:56:19 -0600 To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch), graichen@rzpd.de (Thomas Graichen) From: Tony Overfield Subject: Re: magic of western digital disks ... ? Cc: tech@OpenBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: References: <199701191244.NAA00878@prospero.at.home> <199701191244.NAA00878@prospero.at.home> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk J Wunsch wrote: >As Thomas Graichen wrote: >> ...on another machine i get errors like "hard error reading block >> ..." - but the disk is completely ok and works fine with FreeBSD - >> it also works fine if it is entered into the bios (... btw. after >> getting the "hard error ..." messages i was short before throwing >> the disk away - until i discovered that setting it in the bios >> helped :-) > >This sounds like an initialization problem. If you register it with >the BIOS, the BIOS does some initialization on the disk. Specifically, many IDE drives will not accept media (read/write) commands until a geometry has been specified using the INITIALIZE DEVICE PARAMETERS (0x91) command. A BIOS will always do this for drives that it recognizes. The FreeBSD driver issues this command, but perhaps the OpenBSD driver doesn't (I haven't looked at it).