Sun 669MB disk & SunOS 4.0.3

[Andy Pearman]

In article <1698 at brchh104.bnr.ca> mcmorran at ll.mit.edu (Roy A. McMorran) writes:

>I recently took delivery of a shiny new 669 MB SCSI hard disk (Sun EXP or
>some such, I believe it's a Micropolis 1588-15 under the hood) and
>connected it to my SPARCStation 1.  After having some trouble with the
>formatting,  I called Sun for some assistance.  After some diagnosis I was
>told that this drive is "not supported" under my rev. (4.0.3) of SunOS (a
>fact that my friendly sales rep. didn't mention when I was ordering- he
>assumed I had 4.1, an honest mistake I suppose).

We made the same mistake, although we now have it running on a SS1+
running SunOS 4.0.3.

To get it to work, do the following:

1) Format the disk using 4.1 install tape (just load mini Unix etc so that
   you can run format).

2) Partition the disk as required whilst still in 4.1's format.

3) Run newfs on either a system running 4.1 or a Sun 3 running 4.0.3
   (Sun 3 kernels seem to have more configured into them than ss1's/)

3) Transfer disk to Sparc running 4.0.3 and restore file systems onto it.

NOTE: if disk needs to have newfs run on it, transfer it back to a Sun 3
or a 4.1 system to do it.

Hope this helps,
Andy Pearman, Computer Dept, Philips Research Labs, Redhill, Surrey, England. 
              pearmana at prl.philips.co.uk