Subject: Re: Drive formatting...
To: None <allanc@idea-inc.com>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Holo.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: port-sparc
Date: 01/07/1997 07:54:04
> Sorry if this is horribly basic,

:-)

> but I've only dealt with nice easy little IDE drives on x86 Linux
> systems.  How would I format a SCSI hard drive under NetBSD/Sparc?

That depends on what you mean.  If you really mean "format", as in a
FORMAT UNIT command, I don't think we have any ready interface.  We do
have an arbitrary-scsi-command interface, I think, and a while ago I
think I saw a little program fly by on the lists that used it to send a
FORMAT UNIT.

If you just mean "partition and label", ie, the commonest uses of SunOS
format(8), then the situation is much better.  disklabel is supposed to
work, and on the few occasions when I've tried it it has worked, though
they've been more "smoke tests" after doing changes than real live use.
I have a program "sunlabel" designed for this task, and someone else
here mentioned "edlabel".

> It's a Micropolis 1558, and I don't know what ID it's on...

If the kernel finds it at all, it will report target and lun at boot
time - and you'll need to use the "sd" number assigned by the kernel
during boot.  (If the kernel doesn't find it at boot time, you can't
touch it anyway.)

If it's on the built-in scsi interface, and you have ROMs new enough to
include the probe-scsi command, you could try that.  (If probe-scsi
doesn't see it, it's unlikely the kernel will.)

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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