Re: PR #40571 - NetBSD Atari install fails to prepare 16GB MTRON SSD on ACARD SCSI to IDE bridge

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2009, David Ross wrote:

> Well...  It's been a long time since I zero'd my Seagate.  Other than that, 
> yes.  If the detail in this mail doesn't help, I'll try zero'ing the Seagate 
> first and then doing an install.  At minimum I've done this with NetBSD 1.6.1 
> and it worked, but I can't say that's the case for 5 yet.

        It might be helpful to test on a zeroed out normal SCSI disk, just
        to get a good control. Looks like a random SCSI drive is less than
        £10 on ebay if you don't want to bork your current install.
        (See later for note on zeroing), but we can probably have a couple
        of passes on the ACARD disk first.

> I re-zero'd the MTRON/ACARD combo (in my Adaptec SCSI controller BIOS, same 
> as before).  Then I booted up NetBSD 5 (200902030000Z).  Here's the relevant 
> portion of the dmesg:
> http://i44.tinypic.com/ac5yl3.jpg
>
> Here's the sd0 (Seagate) disklabel.  (This drive had not been zero'd)
> http://i39.tinypic.com/2uo57kl.jpg
>
> Here's the first part of the MTRON/ACARD disklabel:
> http://i42.tinypic.com/2lc4sgw.jpg
> ..and the second part (I did a ctrl-c because there's no 'more' on sysinst):
> http://i39.tinypic.com/9r0en9.jpg

        That disklabel is definitely wacky. Looks like its ended up with
        '-1' in partitions d-g.

> So even though I zero'd the drive, the disklabel is wacky.  When I did the 
> zero'ing operation it completed super fast (a few seconds).  My assumption 
> was because the device is a solid state drive.  But I can imagine it's 
> possible that the ACARD's implementation of the SCSI zero'ing command is 
> "cheating" and not fully overwriting the disk with zeros.

        It could well be. You really only need to zero out the first
        part of the disk, so under NetBSD you can run the following
        to zero out the first 1MB of a disk:

        'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd1c bs=1m count=1'

        Obviously adjust sd1 to match :)

        Random thought - is it possible for you to boot up the machine
        into NetBSD with the ACARD attached as sd1 and then setup ssh so
        I could connect in and test some commands directly? Don't worry
        if not, just trying to speed things up.



--
                David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --