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Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 11:25:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: Yves Lepage <yves@CC.McGill.CA>
Message-Id: <199606151525.LAA18470@maelstrom.CC.McGill.CA>
To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: IBM HD's
Cc: yves@maelstrom.CC.McGill.CA
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Hi all,

During my attemps to install FreeBSD on some 50 machines for 
one of the Inet96 workshops, I had to fight with a few of these
machines which had one of these two kind of HD:

- IBM-DALA
- Quantum Fireball

I could partition the disks no problem and I could do a bad block scan
with also no problem. Problems began when I created the Unix filesystems.

First, I'd get an error message that FreeBSD couldn't swap on
wd0s2b because the device is not configured. Then, the creation
of a filesystem on wd0a would fail. Just as if the labeler
didn't know how to access these disks.

I suspect that these two disks have a strange controller (IDE).
Did anyone encounter this kind of problem before and if so,
what did they do to solve it?

Thanks a lot,
Yves Lepage

PS: yes I did play with the geometry parameters but that didn't do 
anything.