Colin Woods wrote:

> > > Does your drive go into some sort of sleep mode automatically? It could be
> > > that the on-disk cache is getting the sectors to write but not getting to
> > > send them out before MacOS resets the SCSI bus (and possably the drive).
> > 
> > It spins down during a reboot, if that's what you mean.

Spins _DOWN_?????

> David-
> 
> Do you know what kind of hard drive you're using?  I think that what Bill
> is getting at here is that some hard drives support a sleep mode where
> they spin down, and it might be that your hard drive is managing to spin
> down _before_ the sync is performed by a 'shutdown -r'.  If this is the
> case, I think that fixing it should be relatively simple, although I don't
> know for sure.  Most Quantum drives for example have a jumper setting that
> keeps them from spinning down...if you're only going to be running NetBSD
> on the PB, that might be an option.  Otherwise, there may be some kind of
> quirk that needs to be set for your hard drive (although I don't know
> enough about quirks to really tell you on that one :-)

Colin elaborated on what I was getting at. Basically if the drive can put
itself to sleep, it might be asleep when the sync happens. If so,
the drive will need some time to spin up before actually writing. If the
reboot and subsuquent MacOS schenanigans (sp?) happen before the writes
actually get out to the disk, then we can kiss the data goodbye!

Though spinning down sounds like a strange thing to do on boot!

Another solution might be to either add a shutdown hook (or modify
the CPU shutdown code) to wait a few seconds before rebooting. For now,
try shutdown -h as if you then press a key, it reboots.

Take care,

Bill