*BSD News Article 50352


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Newsgroups: comp.periphs.scsi,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
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From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: PCI 2940 Config (and NCR)
Message-ID: <1995Sep3.134248.26342@wavehh.hanse.de>
Organization: The Internet
References: <4298im$h4@trauma.rn.com> <42abn3$mkv@crl.crl.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 95 13:42:48 GMT
Lines: 41
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.periphs.scsi:36772 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:5524

ggrant@crl.com (Gary E. Grant) writes:

>In article <4298im$h4@trauma.rn.com>, Larry Snyder <larry@rn.com> wrote:
>>I recently installed a 2940 Host Adapter in my machine and am using
>>the default settings including "Extended DOS translation for drives
>>greater than 1 Gig = Enabled".  I have a 2 gig SCSI drive with a 400
>>meg partition (the first partiion) as DOS, a 1400 meg BSD partition
>>(FreeBSD 2.0.5) and the 3rd partition is FreeBSD swap.
>>
>>The motherboard is an Opti Chipset P100 with 32 megs of RAM.  The
>>2940 Bios is 1.11.
>>
>>Shouldn't I be able to install the NCR host adapter by just plugging it
>>in the PCI slot on the MB?  The machine won't boot completely and acts
>>like it's having problems with sector translation.  How does the NCR
>>handle drives larger than 1 gig?  This isn't mentioned anywhere in
>>the documentation.
>>
>>larry
>>

>I suspect that that problem is: Adaptec & NCR use slightly different 
>low=level format programs and the boot block format is not the same. What 
>that means that you need to dump the disk to tape, re-fdisk the disk and 
>the reload from the tape. I too have 2940 as well as NCR 810/825 controllers.

>NCR 810 wont boot from disk when it was FDISK'ed with 2940 and vice versa..

This can be true, but doesn't have to. I can use the same partitions
both with NCR and AHA and can boot both by just exchanging the
drive. 

I usually make the first fdisk for every harddrive under MS-DOS and
later modify the label under a UNIX system.  This way, I can be sure
to have disk geometry at least in a defined way. As I said, this way I
can use the same partitioning both for AHA and NCR under FreeBSD. This
didn't work when I used FreeBSD-2.0.5-install to guess geometry.
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>. No NeXTMail, please.
 Norderstedt/Hamburg, Germany. Fax +49 40 522 85 36. This is a 
 private address. At (netless) work programming in data analysis.