> Date: Sun, 14 Jan 1996 11:16:10 -0700 (MST)
> From: Trent McNair <trent@rmci.net>

> I have had a terrible morning.  My drive still does't work, I think it's 
> a hardware problem.  I can write very small programs to the swap 
> partition, but anything over about 50k fails.  When I try to run fsck I 
> get all kinds of errors (i.e. cant read, cant write, soft error, blah blah).

Make sure you have termination power.  I have seen a SCSI bus with
marginal termination work OK at slow speeds (non-DMA) and then fail
once the DMA controller attempts faster SCSI bus cycles...

This is one of the most common and annoying Sun SCSI problems!

> So today I'm going over to my brothers house to use his ps scsi 
> controller to format my drive.  I would be worried about doing something 
> wrong but I'm about to chuck the drive out the window anyway.
> 
> Does anyone know some parameters upon formating that will make the drive 
> friendly with NeBSD? Just some generalities.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Trent McNair
> trent@rmci.net

The main things are:  (1) Use 512-byte sectors and
(2) Configure enough "spare sectors per zone" to allow
the drive to do automatic bad sector remapping when you
format it, so the logical device appears to be perfect.

Item 2 generally has to be done using a SCSI mode page editor,
and must be done immediately before the format command.  Note
that "format with spares" (defect management) is usually the
default configuration, so just doing a format should be OK.

Gordon