Re: Maximum disk size on a Shark

[Richard Earnshaw <Richard.Earnshaw%buzzard.freeserve.co.uk@localhost>]

On Sat, 2008-12-13 at 02:23 +0100, Havard Eidnes wrote:
> > Does anyone know if there's a limit on the size of disk that
> > the shark firmware can support?
> 
> I'm not aware of any such.
> 
> > I recently bought a 80G laptop drive to put in it, but the firmware
> > doesn't seem to be able to see it, and NetBSD install kernel can't find
> > it either (I think it just asks the OFW code).
> 
> How is the drive partitioned?

There aren't any partitions on it (yet...) since NetBSD can't find it.
It's brand new and not formatted for any OS yet.  And yes, I nuked any
MBR while it was plugged into the PC.

> 
> I have two sharks, each now equipped with each their own 160GB
> laptop drive, one running 5.0_BETA, the other 4.0, both say:
> 
> wd0 at atabus0 drive 0: <SAMSUNG HM160HC>
> wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
> wd0: 149 GB, 310101 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 312581808 sectors
> wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)
> 

That's reassuring.

> Firmware is:
> 
> DNARD Rev. 5, 08:00:2b:81:63:3d , 32 MB memory
> Open Firmware  Built February 25, 1998 17:19:25
> Copyright 1997 FirmWorks  All Rights Reserved
> 

Hmm, mine's the September 98 build.

> For reasons I won't go into here, I don't have the console log
> showing the other shark booting, and it's doing pkgsrc bulk
> builds, so I don't want to disturb it needlessly.
> 
> In my case, I have a separate root partition at the start of the
> disk, in my cases 300MB or 1.4GB large.

Yep, I was planning something similar (so that I could put journalling
on the bigger partitions but still have a root partition that the
firmware understood.

I've sucessfully run this board for a number of years with an external
disk (Maxtor 46G and previously a WD 10G drive).  The Maxtor disk seems
to be a bit slow at responding and the firmware doesn't normally find it
at initial power on (so I have to switch the drive on, power on the
shark, power off the shark and then power it on again once the drive has
been properly bought out of reset).  This isn't too traumatic as the
machine is normally running 24/7.

Thanks for the info.  Sounds a bit like the firmware just doesn't like
this disk.