Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 11:41:00 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Cc: dgy@rtd.com, terry@lambert.org, bde@zeta.org.au, hackers@freebsd.org, helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De Subject: Re: wd driver questions Message-ID: <199703171841.LAA08195@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199703171311.AAA12416@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Mar 18, 97 00:11:03 am
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> Your problem may actually be that the drive is jumpered to force > 611/16/63 and broken so that it still reports 790/15/57. Some ESDI > drives had this problem. I hope they are dead now (one I bought in > 1990 cost 4 times as much as a modern IDE drive for 1/12 as much space, > 1/10 as much performance, and 1/10 as much reliability). Actually, the ESDI drives did not understand translation. This was an artifact of the controller. The most notorious of these was the WD1007 ESDI controller. When jumpered for sector sparing, it reported the disk geometry without the sector sparing enabled, which caused all sorts of problems. Basically, it lied. The fix is to disable sector sparing, and use BAD144 sector sparing instead. This is a pain in the butt if the drive is shared between DOS and BSD, since you can't safely change the settings. The NetBSD install allowed you to override the probed geometry at the start; the FreeBSD did not. So both could fdisk, but FreeBSD could not mkfs. For what it's worth: they aren't all dead yet. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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