> [ On Mon, October 5, 1998 at 11:13:31 (-0700), Rick Copeland wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: FW: Question/Help?
> >
> > It looks like your Maxtor drives are SCSI, if this is the case you could
> > low level format them by connecting them up to a PC with most any Adaptec
> > SCSI controller and running the low level format.  I have a Sun 3/150 and
> > have had to do that from time to time between botched installs.  
> 
> You don't need any PC to do this if you can boot SunOS somehow (eg. from
> tape).  The SunOS format(8) command can "fix" any drive, and can indeed
> low-level format any drive, though you probably don't have format it to
> re-write the label with SunOS.

It was SunOS that nuked them (mostly through my lack of feeding the
proper values to it, and not knowing the correct sequence to follow).
I did get one lone Quantum PD LPS240 finally to take a label and format
and partition.  It now has SunOS-4.1.1 up on it.  What I will probably
do is extend the internal cable out the top and up to a second box with
the Maxtors and try that.

Can anyone suggest a better, best, right, sequence of doing the format?

I was assuming that it was disk, type, defect (to restore the manufacturer
defect list), partition, format.  But, that sometimes worked and sometimes
did not (mostly did not).  Why it worked on the one Quantum drive and not
the 3 Maxtors is perplexing.

Also, sometimes the label would take and other times it would not.

The machine is a 12 bay VME case with a 3/110 cpu, a pair of 4M
Carrera ram boards, and the internal scsi board.

The scsi cable is properly terminated with the tape drive and its
interface board terminators on the end of the cable.  The Quantum,
or other drives were put on the remaining inboard connector.

I sense it was something done out of proper sequence on the format
and not any particular hardware problems.

I have to assume the drives are toast (not properly labelled and
formatted since they came from novell systems), and do a bottom-up
setup of the drives, before use.  Somehow (well, anyhow)  I fed the
wrong something somewhere to the format on the SunOS tapes and the
drives are not correctly set up, label/format/table wise.  That is
what I have to somehow correct.

> The NetBSD disklabel(8) command should also be able to write a new label
> without requiring the disk to be re-formatted, though I've not actually
> done this with any recent NetBSD/sun3 (and if I remember correctly it
> didn't work right in some earlier releases that couldn't write
> Sun-boot-rom-compatible lablels -- in that case der Mouse's sunlabel
> program should fix up your disks so they can be used as boot disks
> again.)

I could not get the edlabel to recognize the drives at all in the sun 3
NetBSD install.  It kept coming back with ``drive not configured'' errors
which I was assuming it was not reading a valid disk label to begin with.

Where do I find der Mouse's sunlabel program?

Thanks... and almost there.....

Bob Keys