[ On , September 21, 1998 at 21:53:05 (-0400), Paul F. Wells wrote: ]
> Subject: Is it really the disk drive or something else?
>
> I have installed NetBSD 1.3.2 on an SS2 with 64 meg with SUN2.1G
> hard drive.  The problem I am experiencing is that if I power off
> the machine and restart, the disk drive acts as though it has
> media errors...there are CRC errors, soft read errors, etc.  The
> system sometimes will not boot (short read) or panic immedaitely
> after loading the kernel.

This sounds like an interface problem, not a drive problem.  It could be
cables, termination, connectors, line driver ICs on the drive itself,
line driver ICs on the sparcstation, etc.  It could even be a power
supply problem, or a power connector or cable problem.

How *exactly* do you have the drive connected?  What, if anything, is
connected to the other SCSI connectors on the system, and *exactly* how
are any such things connected.

Does the drive exhibit any similar errors when connected to the i386
machines?

Formatting is not likely to fix/change anything here, esp. if it didn't
work after the first attempt....

Do you have any other SCSI drives you could use to experiment with on
the sparcstation?

In general the SS2's SCSI interface is quite robust and reliable, though
it's very finicky about termination and cable length.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>