Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1997 20:36:19 -0800 From: Jason Downs <downsj@teeny.org> To: Tony Overfield <tony@dell.com> Cc: Joerg Wunsch <joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de>, Thomas Graichen <graichen@rzpd.de>, tech@openbsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: magic of western digital disks ... ? Message-ID: <199701270436.UAA00246@threadway.teeny.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 26 Jan 1997 20:56:19 CST." <3.0.1.32.19970126205619.00684ee4@bugs.us.dell.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <3.0.1.32.19970126205619.00684ee4@bugs.us.dell.com>, Tony Overfield writes: >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). Yes, it does. It wouldn't exactly conform to specs if it didn't. The OpenBSD driver runs disks on things like Amigas, which in way have any sort of BIOS sending initialization commands. -- Jason Downs (503) 256-8535 -/- (503) 952-3749 downsj@teeny.org --> teeny.org: Free Software for a Free Internet <-- http://www.teeny.org/ Little. Yellow. Secure. http://www.openbsd.org/
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199701270436.UAA00246>