> On Aug 11,  6:50pm, Kim G. S. yhus wrote:
> > Subject: Re: Unsuccessful attempt on 1.2 beta scratch-installation
> >
> > You cant do development on the pitifully small IDE disks which
> > are in common use.
> 
> That depends what you're developing. I develop X (several copies of the build
> tree plus a CVS repository) on IDE-only.

You must have a rather large one then. I have 400MB for BSD.
The other IDE slot is occupied by a removable 200MB HD with DOS
filesystem, which I use to exchange data.

By the way, do you know of anyone who sells software to
access DOS IDE-HD & SCSI-PD under RiscOS?

> > And what about me: I work professionally as a unix system administrator,
> > and know perfectly well how to develop unix programs, yet with NetBSD
> > on the RiscPC, I cant get anything done, and i have mounted on
> > a partitioned IDE drive. The reason? I dont have a HD on my
> > cumana scsi card. I have an optical PD instead. This makes the
> > boot sequence crash. Programming like that sucks.
> 
> Thats a new one to me unless you have the drive unloaded at the time (for some
> reason it refuses to probe unloaded IIRC) or have termination configured on the
> card. Please could you let me have some more details (does it hang or panic?,
> etc). I think the Jury is out on whether it is the hardware, software or just
> the combination of the two which sucks :-)

Well, It hangs in at least 2 different ways, when just the PD
is connected, depending on wether I use an external additional terminator
or not. It hangs a little later in he sequence with the terminator.
In both cases it goes into a loop, that hangs after a couple of lines of text.

I connected a defect HD just to see what would happen, and then
it started to panic, also in 2 different ways if I remember
correctly.

All these configurations worked flawlessly under RiscOS.

> > However, I could rewrite it myself if I could boot and compile, which
> > I cant. The chicken and egg problem.
> 
> I can see how that could be a little bit irritating...

Anyway, how difficult would that rewriting be? I suppose NetBSD
has some source code that can be used as base.

Kim0