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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!news!lmjm From: lmjm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Lee M J McLoughlin) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: AHA1542B and Julian's drivers -- *how* many sectors per track? Date: 9 Mar 93 21:07:59 Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London. U.K. Lines: 36 Message-ID: <LMJM.93Mar9210759@kea.doc.ic.ac.uk> References: <tih.731518700@barsoom> NNTP-Posting-Host: kea.doc.ic.ac.uk In-reply-to: tih@barsoom.nhh.no's message of Sun, 7 Mar 1993 15:38:20 GMT In article <tih.731518700@barsoom> tih@barsoom.nhh.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) writes: Tom> I've just installed 386bsd on a machine here by using the latest Tom> release of Terry's patckit and boot images. The SCSI disk has Tom> (physically) 1224 cylinders, 15 tracks per cylinder and 36 sectors per Tom> track. The controller is an AHA1542B. I formatted the disk with one Tom> spare sector per track, and specified the geometry with disklabel as Tom> 1224 cylinders, 15 tracks, 35 sectors. That didn't work too well; I Tom> couldn't use all of the disk for some reason. OK, so I cut back on Tom> the number of cylinders until it fit. So far, so good. Tom> Then I installed Julian's SCSI drivers, and now I get something Tom> interesting: At boot time, the driver claims that my disk has only 34 Tom> sectors per track! That seems reasonable, considering that I couldn't Tom> use all of it with the geometry I set up, but *why* does it come out Tom> that way? Is the AHA controller (or the driver, for that matter) in Tom> some way limited to working with only an even number of sectors per I gave up trying to match the numbers to the data sheet for the disk. Try telling everything that asks that the disk is 512 bytes/sector 32 sectors/track 64 tracks/cylinder So 1 cylinder = 1 Mb. So far 386BSD under the standard and Juliens drivers is happy. As is Linux and DOS. Most of the SCSI disks I've used have a few hidden tracks to handle bad sectors so you probably don't need to reserve any youself. -- -- Lee McLoughlin. Phone: +44 71 589 5111 X 5085 Dept of Computing, Imperial College, Fax: +44 71 581 8024 180 Queens Gate, London, SW7 2BZ, UK. Email: L.McLoughlin@doc.ic.ac.uk