Need help on installing non-SGI system disks in a 4D50

[Dave Olson]

In <5E3D2439B2BF00156B at NRCNET.NRC.CA> SERRER at NRCM3.NRC.CA (Martin Serrer) writes:

| Hello and help,
| 
|   I have an IRIS 4D50/GT, prom monitor version 4D1-3.0 with a 170 MegaByte SCSI
| disk.
|   Last week my only disk on the system broke. And as Murphy's Law dictates, I
| cancelled the hardware part of my service contract a few months ago to 'save the
| Canadian Gov't some money. ;-}
|   Anyway, I had a Maxtor LXT200S 3.5" drive laying around and decided that I
| might use that. HA!
|   The situation now is that, stand-alone fx will format the drive without
| complaint using the 'auto' option. (it will not let me turn on the automatic bad
| block revectoring or the caching. but I'm not sure if that's a problem)
|   However when I then try to install IRIX on this newly formatted disk I get the
| following...
| 
| >> boot -f tpsc(,7,)sash.IP4 --m
| Copying installation program to disk
| ...........................................................
| ...........................................................
| ...........................................................
| .......Copy complete
| 
| 661600dk(0,1,1)(4) Hardware error: Internal controller error.
| dksc(0,0,1)unix.IP4: short read
| couldn't load dksc(0,1,1)unix.IP4
| Unable to continue; press Enter to return to menu:
| 

My guess is that the drive is reporting recovered errors, and
the standalone drivers don't expect to deal with them.  Run
fx again, and make sure that 'report recovered errors' is disabled.

If the drive is truly reporting an internal controller error, then
you should check to see if the drive manual tells you what
circumstances cause this (most don't).  Even if it is a recoverable
error, and internal controller error is something to be seriously
concerned about.  I would take it back to your supplier and try
another drive of the same type.

In general, drives that are sold mainly into the Mac and PC markets
TEND (not all of them) to be further from the common command set than
drives sold into the workstation market.  Newer (design-wise) drives
like the Maxtor 200S) don't usually have this problem.  

I HAVE used the Maxtor 200s on several systems in-house for
qualification purposes, and haven't noticed any problems of the
type that you are reporting, but then I haven't tried to boot them
on non-PI machines.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.