At 11:30 AM 12/24/00 -0800, Hank Lee wrote:
>Chuck,
>the external harddrive I have is :Imprimis
>94181-702D which shows asRA81 on
>"show dev". Is this a really Scsi harddrive?

Yes, its a SCSI hard drive, 601MB unformatted. Probably about 550MB after 
formatting. The reason it says it is an RA81 is that most MSCP controllers 
"lie" about the disk attached to them so that software that looks at that 
information (like the boot software) will recognize them. Some will call 
them and RA90 others and RA82 and some will let you set in firmware what 
you want the drive to report as. Some DEC software was really picky about 
using DEC disk drives :-)

With 600MB you will need to modify my instructions abit since you won't get 
512MB for the /usr/ partition. I'd suggest:
a         32    /
b         64    swap
f         64    /var
g       ~302    /usr

The 'D' indication on your drive *may* suggest that it is a differential 
SCSI drive, if so then you may have a harder time getting additional drives 
that you can put on that SCSI controller.


>I checked the hardware reference at
>
>http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/Hardware/Machines/DEC/vax/sections.html
>
>The page shows this is a 456M harddrive connected
>with "SDI" interface. Is this a scsi interface as well?

Yes, the original RA81 and RA82 were connected to a UDA50 and they weigh *a 
lot* and use a funky/neat four wire serial interface called SDI.
--Chuck