*BSD News Article 58100


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From: root@ag.net (Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: New BIOS for 4gig drive?
Date: 5 Jan 1996 06:05:20 GMT
Organization: Access Global Information Services
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <4cif30$34g@agis.ag.net>
References: <4bh8j5$qfa@hops.entertain.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp8.ag.net
X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.92.6

In article <4bh8j5$qfa@hops.entertain.com>, dwatson@abwam.com (Darryl Watson) says:
>
>Hi!
>
>I am running BSDi 2.0 with patches.
>
>I have a lame-o 2 year-old Micronics 486/66 EISA motherboard,
>a BusLogics 747C(?) SCSI controller, and have 3 1- or 2-gig
>SCSI-II drives currently running.  I started running out of 
>disk space for news, so I added a DEC 4-gig drive.
>
>I couldn't get disksetup to write a label on the drive, or to
>remember partition info, so I newfs'ed the C partition, and am
>using that for news.
>
>When I reboot the machine, right before the drive names get
>printed on the screen, and before the BSDi boot block gets
>loaded, I get a message which says something to the effect that
>I have to upgrade my BIOS!  This seems to be coming from the
>BusLogics card, not BSDi.  I didn't get this message before
>adding the 4-gig drive, so I suspect that my BIOS is an earlier
>one which either can't support a 4-gig drive, or can't support
>4 gigs in a single partition.  ;)  It would also explain why
>I got 'can't write label' messages when I tried to partition the 
>drive.
>
>The drive performs poorly.  One of my friends suggested that when
>I newsfs'ed the drive for news (per the Lizard book suggestion),
>I created a mess-load of inodes, and that too many are hampering 
>the drives' performance.
>
>I think that all of the above problems will be resolved with either:
>1) A BIOS upgrade to the motherboard
>2) A newer motherboard (anyone want a crappy motherboard?)
>3) Some sort of BusLogics EEPROM upgrade.
>
>Does anyone know what is really happening here?  I am not inclined
>to put any more money in the Micronics board; I may just go out
>and get a new Pentium board.
>
>Thanks for any help.
There is also a patch for 4+ gig drives, its u200-001 i beleive, go look on the ftp site. i use a pci bus, pentium 90 and adaptec 1542, with two seagate 4.2 gig drives no problem.