second disk prlbblems, 386/ix 2.0.2

carroll at m.cs.uiuc.edu carroll at m.cs.uiuc.edu
Sat Sep 1 07:23:00 AEST 1990


Yet another disk problem note:
Hardware: Zeos '386 16Mhz tower, Adaptect 2372 RLL controller.
	  Micropolis, drive 0. Seagate ST277R-1 drive 1.
Software: ISC 386/ix 2.0.2.

I'm having problems adding the Seagate as the second drive. After running
through the addharddisk SysAdmin stuff, I try to use the first half as a DOS
partition, and the second half as a UNIX partition. When the UNIX partition is
mounted, I get a device error, "Command aborted", for sector 127782. If I
try to add this sector as a bad sector, I get the error "Sector 127782 is
past the end of the disk". This makes sense - 127782 is on track 819, which
is the landing zone, and reserved. But why is that sector being accessed
when the drive is mounted? When partitioning, it says "819" cylinders
available, so it appears to have taken the landing zone into account. If I
artificially don't use the last few cylinders, it works. But, I can't just
not use the very last cylinder - any size choice from 410 to 406 cylinders
for size gets changed to 409 for the partition size.

Interesting enough, when I try to use SpeedStore on the disk, it thinks it has
820 cylinders, and the landing zone is cylinder 820 (!). It also will only
format/initialize cylinders up to 817. This is the same for the format program
in the controller BIOS. Any clues would be appreciated. Thanks!

Alan M. Carroll                Barbara/Marilyn in '92 :
carroll at cs.uiuc.edu            + This time, why not choose the better halves?
Epoch Development Team         
CS Grad / U of Ill @ Urbana    ...{ucbvax,pur-ee,convex}!cs.uiuc.edu!carroll



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