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

["David Ross" <dross%pobox.com@localhost>]

> Looks like a random SCSI drive is less than £10 on ebay if you don't want 
> to bork your current install.
I don't mind borking any data on the Seagate at the current time.

Ok, I tried zero'ing sd1 using dd and after I do that the disklabel is still 
the same.

I'll contact you privately w.r.t. ssh.

David Ross
dross%pobox.com@localhost


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Brownlee" <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>
To: "David Ross" <dross%pobox.com@localhost>
Cc: <port-atari%netbsd.org@localhost>
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 5:14 AM
Subject: Re: PR #40571 - NetBSD Atari install fails to prepare 16GB MTRON 
SSD on ACARD SCSI to IDE bridge



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 --