6386 300Mb Hard Disk

[alan denney]

In article <1990Sep22.050826.22895 at smcnet.smc.edu> lawrence at smcnet.smc.edu (Lawrence Roney, Telecomm Dept) writes:
>We just bought a Micropolis 1558-15 300Mbyte hard disk for our 6386E Unix
>box.  I'm installing it as a second hard disk in the system.  The unit came
>with a 135Mbyte.  I set the drive type in the system's CMOS config RAM to 
>31--304 Mbyte.  I then ran the Low Level Format program that comes with the
>6386.  It finds what looks to be the proper hard disk and proceeds to format
>the 15 heads and 1221 cylinders.  Everything is going fine so far.  I then
>reboot the Unix system off of the existing HDU and run the Unix FDISK program
>to set up a partition on the new HDU (/dev/rdsk/1s0)
>FDISK only sees 814 cylinders.   Why????  

Why use fdisk directly?  Is there a reason why you don't want to
use diskadd(1)?  Since diskadd does some other magic beyond what
I've seen before, you may want to give it a try.  (I tried partitioning
and mkfs'ing by hand the first time around and had all sorts of
ugly problems.  Especially, watch out for labelit(1)!  It seems that
mkfs doesn't "take" until after labelit is run).

BTW, I'm assuming that you are using the WD1007A-WA2 ESDI controller.

>P.S.  The Micropolis disk was bought from Micropolis direct, not from AT&T.

Shouldn't matter.  Just make sure that you yank the terminating resistor.
The only apparent difference in the AT&T-shipped disks is the LLF.
(I had one of the 300MB drives DOA, and they replaced it with one in
a Micropolis factory box.  Of course, it hadn't been LLFd.  Ugh. 
Call the hotline, wait a week for the LLF disks, which they
double-shipped anyway...)

--
Alan Denney # Informix # aland at informix.com # {pyramid|uunet}!infmx!aland

 "Out on the highway doing 98... radio's blastin', and he's tempting fate
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  She was blowing him kisses through her cigarette         [Was (Not Was)]
  Boy's gone crazy;  it's not just a phase, he's one step over the line..."