Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.ecn.bgu.edu!newspump.wustl.edu!cerberus-138.wustl.edu!usenet From: demediuk@neuro.wustl.edu (Paul P. Demediuk) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: Re: Adaptec 2940/2940w Experience/Problems Date: 13 Feb 1996 18:40:51 GMT Organization: Washington University - Neurology Lines: 66 Message-ID: <4fqlvj$hoo@cerberus-138.wustl.edu> References: <4fdek3$nk0@miso.wwa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: neu02.wustl.edu X-Newsreader: News for Windows NT X1.0-75 richnut@wwa.sashimi.com (Richard A. Nuttle) wrote: >Has anyone tried the new support for the Adaptec 2940 and 2940w in BSDI 2.1? >I'm curious as to the stability of the driver. If anyone has any >examples of a working/reliable configuration it would be most appreciated. >-Rich I currently have an Adaptec 2940 running with BSDI 2.1 on a year old Micron P90 PCI (Saturn chipset) with two 1G Conner 1080S drives. Luckily, I had an emergency backup machine to test the upgrade on, as there is one big potential problem with the controller BIOS. The following is a quote from Paul Borman at BSDI: "> Note that the 2940 requires BIOS boot blocks and not AHA boot blocks. > > A disk label created by one SCSI controller might not be valid for use by > the BIOS of another SCSI controller. We have also noticed, as mentioned > in the READ ME FIRST notes, that there are starting to be more and more > controllers which require and FDISK table, even if you are only installing > BSD/OS. The express install will always create an FDISK table, but during > a custom install you must create one yourself if you have one of these cards. > It is always safe to put an FDISK table on the disk and it does not even > reduce the amount of space available to you. > > Make sure that the geometry used by the FDISK table is the same as the > BIOS geometry. > > You may need to run disksetup with the -II option to ignore the current > labels (both the BSD and FDISK labels) when rebuilding a disk for a > different controller. > > If you are really careful (and after backing up your entire disk) you > can wedge an FDISK table on a disk that currently does not have one. > Run "disksetup -i" and say you have co-residency. Say that BSD/OS and > DOS is *not* your setup. Once you get into the FDISK screen, add exactly > one partition that starts at 0 and is the whole disk of type BSDI, make > sure you mark it active! Use your old BSD disklabel when asked (it should > still work). Install bootany.sys, but when asked if BSD is bootable, > say NO!!! Install the appropriate boot blocks (almost always the bios > bootblocks these days) and write everything out. The 2.1 version of > bootany will not ask any questions and should boot BSD directly. If you > had said "YES" that BSD was bootable it would have prompted you to press > <F1>. See bootany(8) for more information about bootany." I was able to use my old AHA1542 to install the upgrade, reboot to make sure that it was running, and then run disksetup to create an FDISK table and install the BIOS boot blocks. After that, I halted the machine, turned it off, took out the 1542 and put in the 2940. I then rebooted, rebuilt the kernel, merged the various *.bdsi files with their counterparts, rebooted again, and have been up and running since Saturday at 4:00 pm. The machine is used for approx. 200 e-mail users, and a lightly hit WWW server. At reboot, the fsck and quota check steps are now about twice as fast as with the 1542. File searches with "find" are also now much faster. I haven't run any other benchmarks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul P. Demediuk Washington University School of Medicine Neurology Box 8111, 660 S Euclid Ave St Louis, MO 63110 Phone: 314-362-4206 Fax: 314-362-9462 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------