Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1997 20:56:19 -0600 From: Tony Overfield <tony@dell.com> To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch), graichen@rzpd.de (Thomas Graichen) Cc: tech@OpenBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: magic of western digital disks ... ? Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970126205619.00684ee4@bugs.us.dell.com> In-Reply-To: <Mutt.19970119152018.j@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <199701191244.NAA00878@prospero.at.home> <199701191244.NAA00878@prospero.at.home>
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J Wunsch wrote: >As Thomas Graichen wrote: >> ...on another machine i get errors like "hard error reading block >> ..." - but the disk is completely ok and works fine with FreeBSD - >> it also works fine if it is entered into the bios (... btw. after >> getting the "hard error ..." messages i was short before throwing >> the disk away - until i discovered that setting it in the bios >> helped :-) > >This sounds like an initialization problem. If you register it with >the BIOS, the BIOS does some initialization on the disk. Specifically, many IDE drives will not accept media (read/write) commands until a geometry has been specified using the INITIALIZE DEVICE PARAMETERS (0x91) command. A BIOS will always do this for drives that it recognizes. The FreeBSD driver issues this command, but perhaps the OpenBSD driver doesn't (I haven't looked at it).
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