On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, Sageev T. George wrote:

Howdy!  Nice to see a friendly face around here.  Glad you got your
machine up and running.

> Everything was working great until the drive
> would stop working intermittently, which I'm sure isn't
> a surprise to anybody subscribed to this mail list.

Yeah, mine were pretty bad.

> So, I'm going to reinstall.  First problem:  What can
> I do to minimize the problems that these deteriorating
> Rodime drives present?  Can I do a low-level format?

That should help, but you'll need to format it on some other platform
(such as mac or pc), since NetBSD can't do low level formats on hp300.

> Even better, is there any way that I can make sure
> that any file system creation does a very, very unforgiving
> bad block check?

No idea.

> Second problem:  I'd love to use another SCSI drive,
> but SCSI-II drives that are recognized by my 386 with
> NetBSD are not recognized by this hp300 system.
> The drive I'd like to install is a Seagate ST1480N.
> I've really only tried accessing this drive with the
> SYS_INST program, which refused to see it.

Hmmm, idunno.  That's a little weird.  Are you sure you're telling
SYS_INST the correct name for your drive (ISTR that it was sdX, where X is
the SCSI ID, not the order in which it is probed by the kernel).

> If I can get the Rodime up and running, would a running
> NetBSD system be able to see the Seagate drive?

Possibly.

> Is there something I can do with the boot-PROM
> menu to make it see this drive?  I've read in the
> archives that pressing the spacebar makes the boot
> program scan for the SCSI drives, but I wasn't
> sure if that was correct.

Actually, hitting any key will scan all drives for a bootable program and
then you can select which one to boot from.  It won't list devices that
don't have a valid boot program.  See
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/hp300/faq.html#bootsearch

Good luck,
  -- MW

BTW have you seen Becky yet?