Hi all,
Wilko suggested that I try reformatting the HD to see if it could be fixed
by just updating the grown defects list...I didn't know how to do this
under NetBSD (is there a way?). I attached the drive to my Mac to use FWB's
hard disk toolkit to do a media scan...my Mac wouldn't even boot with the
drive attached...it gave the sad mac (if any of you use Macs, you'll
understand). So, I'm kinda thinking that it may be something wrong with the
SCSI electronics onboard te drive. At any rate, I threw that drive aside &
stuck a Seagate Wren9 drive in (on?) my Alpha. I booted with the floppy &
re-untarred a recent base.tgz onto the /mnt to correct the corruption probs
from the earlier drive. I also went through the disklabel & newfs on the
wren. When booting, the dmesg gave:

scsibus0 at ncr0: 8 targets, 8 luns per target
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 0: <QUANTUM, FIREBALL1080S, 1Q08> SCSI2 0/direct
fixed
sd0(ncr0:2:0): 10.0 MB/s (100 ns, offset 8)
sd0: 1042MB, 3835 cyl, 4 head, 139 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 2134305 sectors
probe(ncr0:4:0):  Check Condition on CDB: 0x00 00 00 00 00 00
    SENSE KEY:  Media Error
     ASC/ASCQ:  Medium Format Corrupted

sd1 at scsibus0 targ 4 lun 0: <SEAGATE, ST42100, 8224> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd1(ncr0:4:0): 10.0 MB/s (100 ns, offset 8)
sd1: 1812MB, 2574 cyl, 15 head, 96 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 3711990 sectors



I wasn't sure if that was a remnant of the earlier problem, since it seemed
to be even before I saw the new hard drive, so to test, I tried
cp -R usr newdrive/
It got through all 535767k without so much as a hiccup (although disk
copying IS dog-slow). Should I be worrying about the new drive...& is there
a formatting utility in NetBSD that will do low-level formats & media
checks?

Thanks for any info,
Mike
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