*BSD News Article 31344


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From: cseanf@huey.cc.utexas.edu (Chris Ficklin)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 1.1 CDROM
Date: 6 Jun 1994 21:30:20 -0500
Organization: The University of Texas - Austin
Lines: 25
Message-ID: <2t0m3s$1pk@huey.cc.utexas.edu>
References: <CqyxzJ.CGn@megatest.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: huey.cc.utexas.edu

In article <CqyxzJ.CGn@megatest.com>,
Dave Albrecht <albrecht@megatest.com> wrote:

A
>That said the installation process in general went pretty smoothly.  I
>attempted to install this to a 320M western digital scsi drive which
>is BIOS mapped as drive C: (I go into the CMOS setup and disable the
>IDE drive) by an Adaptec 1542B.  The installation works fine, however,
>after installation I can't boot the drive.  I can boot the floppy and
>tell it hd(0,a)/386bsd or some such and it will boot the drive but it
>won't boot directly.
>
>What doc there is suggests there might be problems with translated drives.
>Well that is all fine and good but frankly I have no idea if the adaptec
>is somehow translating this drive and if it is I sure as hell have no
>idea what parameters it is using....

Most Adaptec cards use a translation of 32 HDS & 64 SPT.  The CYL is 
the size of your drive in MB.  If you are using the SCSI drive w/
another non-UNIX OS then you will run into problems.  The other OSs
use the SCSI BIOS for translation.  BSD & other Unixes do not.  They
use the BIOS for one call on boot then talk straight to the drive
after that.  If you don't tell BSD to do its own translation you
will trash whatever else is on you drive and BSD might not work
correctly.  Which seems to be your problem...