From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Jul  5 05:59:09 1995
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From: Paul Richards <paul>
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Subject: Re: Stabikity/Usability of 2.0.5R
To: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert)
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 1995 05:59:07 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: davidg@Root.COM, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <9507050122.AA03337@cs.weber.edu> from "Terry Lambert" at Jul 4, 95 07:22:18 pm
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> 
> 
> The Install wants to use a translated geometry (the real geometry
> is 1224/15/35) of something like xxx/15/51.
> 
> The amusing thing is that when it scans for bad blocks (the drive
> has to have bad block replacement enables in BSD), it gets an error
> on every 35th scan.  I would suspect something wierd with the disk,
> but 1.1.5.1 sails right on.  So it's clearly in the disklabel stuff.
> 
> Interestingly, the "every 35th try" error on the scan seems to
> indicate (to me, at least) that the drive is not being accessed
> linearly; apparently the adjacency of sectors is being miscalculated
> and it's skipping all over the disk.  There was a complaint about
> large amounts of drive noise about a month ago that was never very
> well explained -- possibly it's this?
> 
> The upshot is that it's totally uninstallable, even using the "put
> a DOS partition on it" workaround, and modifying the BIOS geometry
> to match the real geometry (or letting it use its fictional geometry
> it comes up with).
> 

There definately seems to be something wrong with our install code
in this area. I haven't succeeded in getting 2.0.5 install to
actually work (the disklabelling bit that is, the rest works ok)
yet and I've done 3 or 4 now. 

My last effort was with a disk clean out of the box. If we can't install
onto a spanking new clean disk then there's definately something wrong :-)