disk for 2400T

[George Baciu [CGL]]

In article <CMM.0.88.610317789.lacomb@>, lacomb at SIERRA.STANFORD.EDU ("Lloyd J. Lacomb") writes:
> I'm having a little bit of a problem.  Yesterday, someone came to me telling
> me that their one of the disks on their 2400T crashed.  Sure enough the
> disk was getting power but it just wasn't turning.  Most of the information
> is backed up so not much will be lost if we can put a new disk in.  The
> problem is that even with the new prices on the 72 Mb disks from SGI, the
> paper work to get one would take a least a month which won't help if something
> is due in a week.  What I thought might be possible was to take
> another ESDI 72 Mb drive from a PC in the lab and try to use that disk
> to replace the dead one in the IRIS.  After getting all the hardware
> hooked up, I booted the system and the controller (or something)
> doesn't seem to recognize the second drive at all. It says something
> like:
> 
> md0 Priam v170 and some more numbers (even though the drive says it's
> made by Vertex) 
> md1 not installed (not sure about the wording)
> 
> Nothing I've tried: mdfex(which doesn't seem to be documented
> anywhere,) mkfs, sgilabel, ... seems to work,  All return some
> message about drive not found.  The controller is an old one designed
> to handle only 72 Mb drives but I can't figure out what I need to do
> to get the system to find or recognize the drive.
> 
> When I installed my disk, sent from SGI, I don't remember having similar
> problems, but that may be because they've already done something to
> the disk so the controller will recognize them.  Does anyone out
> there know the procedure(I imagine some procedure must exist) for
> installing a disk on a 2400T.
> 

Disk installation is not quite as simple as connecting the wires
especially when you attempt to install a disk that does not come from
SGI. A couple of things need be done before you load the os onto it.

	1) First you must format the disk correctly. This involves
	   quite a few little details like:
		o knowing the type of disk you are dealing with
		o whether the disk is one of the types recognized by
		  the disk formatter
		o knowing its capacity in terms of number cylinders/tracks.
		o knowing partition sizes for the release version of the os,
		o knowing which sector the boot header should be loaded.
		o MOST IMPORTANTLY knowing the list of bad blocks.

	For the 2400's I recommend you get a PRIAM V185 either from SGI
	or from a third party vendor. This is well supported by the
	hardware configuration program on 2400 (disk formatter mdfex), rather
	than trying other disks - and you can use the default settings
	in the disk formatter after setting its label to V185.

	2) In order to get to the disk formater you must use mdfex in
	   the extended mode - this requires booting the mdfex from tape
	   and then pressing SHIFT-Z. This will ask you for a password,
	   which you must know. SGI could provide you with this passwd
	   depending on the software release you are using.

	3) After you have all the above information and you got into
	   the mdfex extended mode, it is just a matter of choosing
	   the "s" for setting the partition sizes and disk label,
	   "q" to quit from the set option, and then you must format
	   the disk with "f".

Well, I relize the above is hand-waving but you must know all the specs
of your system and of the disk before you dive into this job - else
very little chance of success.
-- 
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