*BSD News Article 16050


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!wupost!uunet!news.smith.edu!sophia.smith.edu!jfieber
From: jfieber@sophia.smith.edu (J Fieber)
Subject: Re: Elusive SCSI problems (Adaptec 1542C)  <snarl!>
Message-ID: <1993May14.004015.23497@sophia.smith.edu>
Keywords: Adaptec 1542C, Quantum, SCSI, 386bsd
Sender: root@sophia.smith.edu (Operator)
Organization: Smith College
References: <1993May12.023959.20121@sophia.smith.edu>
Date: Fri, 14 May 1993 00:40:15 GMT
Lines: 53

In article <1993May12.023959.20121@sophia.smith.edu> jfieber@sophia.smith.edu (J Fieber) writes:
>All ye out in netland, I hope some kind soul can help me
>with a little problem...
>
>Supposedly the Adaptec 1542C works fine with 386bsd with
>the 0.2.3 patchkit.  Others have testified here that it does.
>
>For me, it does not and for a week I have been tearing my
>hair out trying to find the source of the problem and don't 
>feel a bit closer to the solution at this point.  
>
>Here is the scoop thus far:

I'm still tearing hair out but have discovered some things that
change the scene a bit.  

- It appears as though reading and writing from the Archive Viper
tape drives works fine.

- I have a lot of trouble getting disklabels to stick.  They work
if I disklabel -e -r but rarely if I disklabel -w -r.  I tried
changing the geometry in the disklabel from that reported by the
SCSI probe to 64 heads / 33 blocks per track as suggested by one
person.  (Apparently that is the geometry the controller uses.)

- I still get corrupted data when reading or writing to the
Quantum P105S.  The filesystem still gets trashed.

- I started trying out my Quantum PD210S.  I can disklabel it but
cannot newfs it.  I get the following message:

  write error: 411647 
  wtfs: Invalid argument

followed by a console message saying:

  sd1: illegal request

411647 is the last block in my `a' partition of sd1.

Both disks work fine under MS-DOG.  Since the tape drive works,
I'm more suspicious that *I* am doing something wrong or there is
something wierd interaction between the 1542C and the Quantum
drives. 

Any insights?

Thanks to all who replied to my first plea for help.

-john
-- 
=== jfieber@sophia.smith.edu ================================================
======================================= Come up and be a kite!  --K. Bush ===