From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jul 5 16:13:48 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id QAA10356 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 5 Jul 1995 16:13:48 -0700 Received: from cs.weber.edu (cs.weber.edu [137.190.16.16]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id QAA10345 for ; Wed, 5 Jul 1995 16:13:46 -0700 Received: by cs.weber.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1.1) id AA06876; Wed, 5 Jul 95 17:05:17 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Message-Id: <9507052305.AA06876@cs.weber.edu> Subject: Re: Stabikity/Usability of 2.0.5R To: wilko@yedi.iaf.nl (Wilko Bulte) Date: Wed, 5 Jul 95 17:05:16 MDT Cc: davidg@root.com, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199507051727.TAA01274@yedi.iaf.nl> from "Wilko Bulte" at Jul 5, 95 07:27:22 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4dev PL52] Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > What a coincidence. I already started to feel stupid. I have a > 386/25 here with a WD1007 and a 1224/15/35 drive (a ~300Mb > micropolis). Same problems.. I'm kinda glad it also bit you ;-) Probably also an AT&T/NCR machine? > Yep, same here. I once had 1.1.5. on this system and that worked > OK. Are you able to select a non-translated drive using the WD1007 > BIOS? Mine doesn't. Disabling the BIOS of the WD and selecting the > untranslated geometry in the system BIOS also gives me the > n * 35 badblocks. I can't select anything in BIOS. The ESDI drives are, by default, not translated anyway. It's only BSD that wants to assume a non-default geometry for the things. These were built as SVR4 boxes in the first place; it was never expected that there would be DOS & therefore no DOS correction is necessary. There is a jumper for "perfect media"... basically, self-replacement of bad sectors. This is a geometry translation of a sort, but since it's BIOS only, I don't have it on. > > Interestingly, the "every 35th try" error on the scan seems to > > indicate (to me, at least) that the drive is not being accessed > > linearly; apparently the adjacency of sectors is being miscalculated > > and it's skipping all over the disk. There was a complaint about > > large amounts of drive noise about a month ago that was never very > > well explained -- possibly it's this? > > I have a faint recollection that I had to tell 1.1.5. to use 34 > sectors (when the drive actually has 35) before it wanted to install. > Telling 2.05R to use 34 does not work. This is critically strange anyway, in either case: there should be no knowledge of C/H/S values in any case in BSD once it's up; they are simply a convenience for any DOS partitions and DOS partition table crap that happens to be there. The odd thing is that it dies every 35th, so it seems that the head is used as a multiplier and pushes it past the end of the disk. One would expect that that behaviour would cause normal accesses to skip all over the disk (hence the "drive chatter" reports). The point being that if head 1 worked and head 17 worked, then head 35 sould work too. Clearly, what's happening is that the head multiplier is more significant in determining the sector offset than it should be. If the drive were "sized" too large, one would expect success all the way from the start of the disk until you ran out of cylinders (you can't expect that you'd run out of heads). > > Anyone else have a machine with a WD1007 that they installed instead > > of upgraded from an existing (non-2.0.5R: working) installation? > > As you know by now it fails for me. I might retry 1.1.5 on it just > to see. Well, I have three more days, and I'll be away from the equipment yet again, so if anyone wants a diagnostic run on their code, now is the time to get it if you want it done by me. Otherwise Wilko will have to be your remote pilot. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.