Hauke Fath wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> after a busy weekend I am pretty positive that my trouble with the shiny
> new DCAS 4G disk is somewhat related to partitioning/disklabel stuff.
> 
> In short: A setup with 6 partitions (MacOS boot, root, swap, /usr, /var,
> /home) appears to work -- adding another partition no matter what type
> blows up the kernel. That`s essentially what kern/5174 is about.

If you format the disk and then create the partitions, does it work?  I've
had trouble with some formatters munging the partition map when I added
partitions later.
 
> Now, I set up the disk with said six partitions, newfs'ed and started to
> move things over from the old disk. No problems with the root device
> (~20MB), but for /usr (~300MB) I got

[snip]

> and the box hangs. (this is in single user). For what it's worth,
> interrupting gives
> 
> Panic switch: PC is 0x36a8.
> Stopped at      _Debugger+0x6:  unlk    a6
> db> t
> _Debugger(c02aa,36a8,142f30,3462,0) + 6
> _nmihand(0,0,0,2004,0) + 26
> _lev7intr(?)
> _mi_switch(0,0,142200,f9000e00,0) + 12
> _tsleep(e8b30,4,98046,0) + 178
> _scheduler(4f6200,1d10c,1f7b0,1f650,8004025a) + 66
> _main() + 4c6
> _main() + 4c6
> db>
> 
> -- not too informative, either. Rebooting, newfs'ing sd1g and retrying the
> copy yields the same result.

Looks like it went to sleep somewhere and never woke back up again.  I've
seen similar traces before, but still don't quite know what causes it.
Perhaps waiting on some resource that is never going to become available?
I don't know enough about how tsleep works, tho....

> So, what are others' experiences with big disks ( >1/2GB) and NetBSD/mac68k?

I've got a 3 GB Quantum drive (Fireball?) that has 2 or 3 NetBSD
partitions on it.  It worked fine when I had a single Usr type partition
on it (it also has about 12 MacOS partitions).  After attempting to add
the newer partitions, it likes to hang during mount or when doing a
disklabel.  I can't remember where the problem is.  I also can't remember
whether or not the Installer sees these partitions or not, but I seem to
remember that the Installer dies on it.  I think it has the corrupted
partition map problem :-(

I also have a 4 GB Micropolis drive which works just fine (crossing my
fingers as I say this :-)  I've got a full 7 NetBSD partitions on it, I
believe, as well as a MacOS partition.  It has never given me trouble.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.