At 04:23 PM 6/3/99 +0200, you wrote:
>Does anybody have info on getting ESDI disks running properly on the
>uVAX-II? It seems to recognize the controller, but when I try to disklabel
>the disks, it reports that the disks don't have a valid architecture?
>(It reports no cylinders??)

I suspect the other email that you need to low level format your drives is
correct, however if you had formatted them once before (NetBSD 1.2) then
that part of it shouldn't be necessary, strange. I've got a couple of
Micropolis ESDI disks on my uVAX II (Sigma RQ11D controller) and they had
to be formatted 83 sec/track vs the 84 that was "standard" on the PC. Not
sure why but it made the disks usable. 

Also ESDI disks need to have the last disk in the chain terminated
otherwise you will get errors.

Another idea that occurred to me, the MSCP driver doesn't tell the
controller to spin up the drives, it assumes the drives have been spun up
by the controller. I'm not familiar with the Dialogic controller but
perhaps it doesn't have an "automatic startup" feature? This is easily
checked with skins of the VAX just listen to the drive on power up and let
us know if it spins up. The RQ11 controller keeps information about
geometry on track 0 so when it spins up the drive it actually goes out and
talks to the drive once as well.

When you do get this running, please let me know if you experience
processes freezing in biowait or diskwait. Thanks,

--Chuck