Re: Need help - lost access to my NetBSD partitions

[Gunther Nikl <gni%gecko.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 03:26:50PM +0000, Lars Hecking wrote:
> > >  A3000 with CS MkIII, Quantum Viking II 4.5GB at SCSI id 8; Kick ROM 3.1
> >                                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >   Stupid question (I am not a SCSI expert): Is this a wide harddisk?
>  
>  Yep. ISTR reading somewhere (maybe even the CSMkIII docs :) that it's a
>  good idea to use the upper 8 ids for UW disks if you have UW devices and
>  narrow/wide devices on the same bus. Which I have (one SCSI2 disk on the
>  other leg of the controller).

  Well, I don't know if thats really true but it sounds logical: If you want
  to use narrow and wide devices on the same hostadapter you can't use any
  wide ids because the narrow devices won't recognize the wide id. The
  narrow device might think the request is targeted for its id but really
  its for the wide id.

>  That is clear, but why should that make a difference? I thought that
>  RDB is standard?

  Well, according to several people there are some grey areas in the
  RDB specification. I think if you search usenet you will find some
  explanation about this topic. Using SCSIconfig and HDToolBox has
  already caused a lot of headache to other people.

>  HDToolbox doesn't have (direct) RDB operations. I didn't use it because
>  when I tried to read the disk geometry with it, it gives me completely and
>  obviously bogus values.

  What version of HDToolbox dou you have? I thought from V44 and up it would
  do its job...

> >   You do only need this if you want to use FFS on a partition beyound or
> >   crossing the 4GB limit.
>  
>  Currently not the case, even with that new scratch partition.

  BTW, if you have FFS 45.x you should use that. It shall have less bugs
  than V40 (which is the base for V44). Unfortunately, that means you must
  have NSDSupport from SetPatch activated if you want partitions beyound
  4GB working.

> It looks like I will have to go the HDToolBox route, even if it
> means loss of all data. Maybe rdbread FORCE first ...

  Well, if you really consider using HDToolBox with all its consequences
  (loss of data), then you should try "rdbread FORCE" since it won't harm
  then.
  If you recreate the RDB with exactly the same partition settings then
  you should get your partitions back. This has already worked one time
  for me.

  Gunther