Subject: Re: SBC probs
To: Chris Mason <cmason@nando.net>
From: The Great Mr. Kurtz [David A. Gatwood] <davagatw@mars.utm.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 08/30/1996 11:32:52
On Fri, 30 Aug 1996, Chris Mason wrote:

> checks (sequential _and_ random read _and_ write, it took almost 3 hours),
> which discovered no errors.

To throw in another POV, I've had similar problems with my brand-spanking-
new (Quantum) internal drive on my PB145, both with NCRSCSI and sbc,
but the drive checks out fine.  Redoing mkfs makes the problem go away for
about a week and then it returns in full force, with a list of literally
hundreds of bad blocks in fsck.  I haven't checked the syslog, so I don't
know if the problems are recorded there or not, but the sheer quantity of
errors would suggest that either 1. the hardware is failing on 40, 50,
60+ percent of its reads (which would undoubtedly show up under MacOS as
well), or 2. there's some software-hardware interaction problem causing
blocks to come up bad.  In my case, it's just because the NetBSD driver
has never really worked correctly.  However, previously I used an older
kernel that only created inode damage.  Switching to a more recent kernel,
all of a sudden, there are read errors and bad blocks.  I haven't touched
the powerbook for NetBSD in about a month, and the kernel that's giving me
the bad blocks is an intvidtest.  An ADBtest kernel from several months
ago didn't exhibit this problem.

I'm assuming that whatever settings are stored in the driver partition on
the disk are ignored since NetBSD uses its own driver, right?  Do any of
those settings carry over, since the power to the drive is never cut, or
are they driver-internal?  Such as the auto-repair stuff?

Thoughts?

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