*BSD News Article 12489


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: tih@barsoom.nhh.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo)
Subject: AHA1542B and Julian's drivers -- *how* many sectors per track?
Message-ID: <tih.731518700@barsoom>
Sender: news@barsoom.nhh.no (USENET News System)
Organization: Norwegian School of Economics
Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1993 15:38:20 GMT
Lines: 23

I've just installed 386bsd on a machine here by using the latest
release of Terry's patckit and boot images.  The SCSI disk has
(physically) 1224 cylinders, 15 tracks per cylinder and 36 sectors per
track.  The controller is an AHA1542B.  I formatted the disk with one
spare sector per track, and specified the geometry with disklabel as
1224 cylinders, 15 tracks, 35 sectors.  That didn't work too well; I
couldn't use all of the disk for some reason.  OK, so I cut back on
the number of cylinders until it fit.  So far, so good.

Then I installed Julian's SCSI drivers, and now I get something
interesting: At boot time, the driver claims that my disk has only 34
sectors per track!  That seems reasonable, considering that I couldn't
use all of it with the geometry I set up, but *why* does it come out
that way?  Is the AHA controller (or the driver, for that matter) in
some way limited to working with only an even number of sectors per
track or something?

Any hints greatly appreciated!

-tih
--
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, NHH, Bergen, Norway.  Telephone: +47-5-959205
Postmaster for domain nhh.no.   Internet mail address: tih@nhh.no