Subject: Re: Annoying panics...
To: None <cwood@ichips.intel.com>
From: None <ADAMGOOD@delphi.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 08/10/1997 04:34:40
Colin,

I don't know if you recognize it, but that's the same error I got when I
was trying to put BSD on a Jaz disk.  What an enormous pain in the ass.
After trying for three days (literally) I gave up.

I did find that that panic stopped happening when I used the /sbin/swapon
from the 1.2 distribution.  Then it gave me some new errors.  I eventually
gave up.

On a related note, the Jaz disk is a bitch to work with for several reasons.
First of all, no good partitioning software exists.  I was using APS 4.0.2
and it was a mess.  The APS driver replaces the Iomega driver when you
partion the disk (what was Apple smoking when they decided to put drivers
for the disks on the disks themselves?  Or am I not understanding what
happens here?).  That makes it so that the Iomega driver doesn't load
when you have that disk installed.  Then when you boot into MacBSD, the
disk is auto ejected (with no way to stop this from happening), because
the mechanism to prevent auto eject at shutdown is a function of the Iomega
driver.  So you have to hurry up and push the Jaz disk back into the drive
before the kernel scans the SCSI devices.

I tried everything I could think of to remedy this.  In the end, all I ever
accomplished was that the Mac wouldn't recognize the Jaz disk upon insertion,
and I re-initialized it with the Iomega driver (which also became a
convoluted process - I had to boot from a Jaz disk with an Iomega driver
on it just to get the Iomega utilities to start up (they require that a
Jaz disk with an Iomega driver already be loaded or the won't start, hence
preventing you from installing a new driver on a defective disk - more
brilliant engineering), and then when I tried to eject the 'good' Jaz
disk and put in the 'bad' one the Mac said the 'bad' one was unreadable
and wanted to initialize it, never letting me get to the Iomega utilities.
Uhg.  Don't do this at home.).

Then I had grief with (what I suspect) was Mkfs.  I got the new 1.45 and
reformatted my old 'fixed' hard disk which had been trashed in various
attempts to deal with the Jaz BSD.  I had a root and a usr partition.
When I first mounted the usr partition (before installing anything on it),
I get a message telling me it's not clean and to f-ck it (errr . . . fsck
it).  When I did a 'df' on it (before 'fsck'ing) it showed that several
hundred thousand blocks had already been allocated, but I had just 'newfs'ed
it from the Mac side.  Hmmm . . .  I 'newfs'ed it again from the BSD side,
and this time 'df' showed that the partition was indeed empty.

Then I began to notice another problem;  Everytime 'mount' mounts root, it
tells me that the partition is not clean and to fsck it.  It will even do
this immediately after I've fscked it and it's marked the partition clean.
This happens repeatably.

In case anyone needs to know, I'm running this on a PB160 w/ 12MB RAM on
an external 800MB Quantum hard disk with additioinal adventures on an
external Jaz drive.  My kernel is Takashi's powermanager w/ intvid build
from 1/9/97.  The newer ones from July '97 that Takashi has posted on his
web page don't boot (sorry Takashi) on my PB.  The rest of the distribution
is the 1.2.1 binaries.

Oh, one thing I forgot - in addition to the mount root/not clean problem,
when I try to use the installer on that disk, and I do an 'ls' it says
something about bad inodes and dies.  Not a good sign, but that doesn't
happen once I'm in BSD, so I used 'hfs' to copy all the tarballs to the
BSD side and installed them from there.

This has been an EXTERMELY frustrating waste of three days.  I hope this
experience is useful to someone.

Upon reflection, I probably should've changed the subject: field on this
message, but my mail reader won't let me now.  Ooops.  Sorry Colin.

-Adam