Eagle problem, help needed (long)

[Hans Breitenlohner]

We are running a setup such as yours quite successfully.  (M2351A disk,
QD32 controller on a Microvax 3200, used to be a Microvax II).

First, the disktab entry for the eagle is wrong.  ns should be 47 (one
spare sector per track), and nc should be 840 (2 spare cylinders).
This would give a total of 789600 sectors per disk, but somehow
only 787156 sectors are available. (2444 sectors missing, perhaps used
for block replacement tables?)

Having said this, I must stress that, as far as I know, the only penalty
for giving newfs bad information about the disk geometry would be bad
performance.  Our disks were newfs'd as RA81s, and have worked fine for
years.

Have you run the data verify or the data reliability section of the
diagnostics?

My first guess would be that the disk drive is not strapped properly.
One Emulex manual states that the sector size should be 594, but the
correct number is 587.

You can determine if this is a problem with the following little 
exercise:
        dd if=/vmunix of=xxx bs=10k count=10
        dd if=xxx of=/dev/rra8a bs=10k count=10
        dd if=/dev/rra8a of=yyy bs=10k count=10
        cmp xxx yyy
I would guess that you will find xxx and yyy to be different, with
the differences confined to certain sectors.

If you need more information, please send mail, and specify which
version of Ultrix, and which revision of the QD32 ROMs you have.

Hans Breitenlohner
hans at umd5.umd.edu