At 10:12 AM -0500 10/10/02, Steven Grunza wrote:
>I've run out of disk space too many times and have added a 9GB Cheetah
>drive to my work system but I'm getting a strange "drive offline" message
>and "Operation not supported by device" messages.  Any one have any clues?
[...]

Is the drive spinning up? Almost all drives will have a jumper to disable
spinup-on-poweron. (alternatley, there may not be enough power available at
boot to spin up the drive, cheetahs are very power-hungry drives)

With that jumper enabled, the host will have to sent a start unit command
to the drive to get the platters spinning before any other operations can
take place.

Some OSes will automatically send a start unit command when the drive is
offline, and some won't. I don't know which category NetBSD falls into, as
there's no real 'correct' behaviour in this situation.


Cheers - Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler :)


--
Tony "Nicoya" Mantler - Renaissance Nerd Extraordinaire - nicoya@apia.dhs.org
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada           --           http://nicoya.feline.pp.se/