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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!network.ucsd.edu!swrinde!gatech!asuvax!ennews!mcdphx!udc!dacapo.urbana.mcd.mot.com!tcombs
From: tcombs@dacapo.urbana.mcd.mot.com (Tim Combs)
Subject: esdi drive
Message-ID: <1993Sep13.135754.11177@urbana.mcd.mot.com>
Sender: news@urbana.mcd.mot.com (News)
Nntp-Posting-Host: dacapo.urbana.mcd.mot.com
Organization: Motorola Computer Group, Urbana Design Center
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1993 13:57:54 GMT
Lines: 34
I finally got NetBSD.9 up on my system at home. It took me a while because I use (old, used but
really cheap) ESDI drives on my system. The problem was the bad sectors on my drive keeping me
from putting even the binary09 version on my system. Every time I went to ftp the binaries in,
the system would lock up on a bad sector (I tried just updating the bad sector table after each one of
these but after a while and endless reboots, I knew there had to be a better way.) After research
(mucho thanks go to minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au, because without that I would have been totally lost), I discovered Jim Bevier's scanning version of bad144. But the kicker was I couldn't compile the
program 'cause I didn't have a working version and I wasn't sure that this version of bad144 was
compatible with NetBSD's wd.c. So searching through the articles I found a reference the FreeBSD's
installation mentioning something about scanning, so this is what I did:
1. downloaded the FreeBSD installation floppies.
2. Put them on diskette...(rats, go to the store buy more diskettes, come home, put the kids to bed.... ok
tomorrow I will get this up.)
3. Ran the FreeBSD installation on my disk. When it got to scanning quickly write down all of the bad
sectors. (Did you know that almost my entire cylinder 308 was bad?)
4. Reinstall NetBSD.9 on the system. Make sure when I booted that it made reference to a sector used
for bad sectors.
5. Added all the bad sectors to the list.
6. Ftp cautiously 10 files at a time until I was sure I got no errors.
7. Ran the extract for the binary (found one more bad sector on my root partition)
8. Added the other distributions then voila! NetBSD 0.9 is up and running.
Things I learned:
1. Need to reboot after running bad144 -a wd0 sector_number because it will lock up on that sector
and give a message like, "Time out waiting ...resetting".
2. Learned about sector, cylinder, head translation to sector number and back. Pulled that from the pfdisk
program and wrote a simple translation program.
3. That pfdisk is indispensible for this process. (Thanks!)
Thanks to NetBSD 0.9 folks for all your time in putting together this release.
Thanks to FreeBSD folks for making your installation really easy ( I especially like the cylinders instead
of the sectors) and adding the scanning version of bad144.
Thanks to whoever fixed the tape driver to actually almost stream when I loaded files. A big improvement!
Thanks
Tim