Gunnar Helliesen wrote:
> 
> The good news: I got another VAXstation 2000 last week. This one has the
> adapter plate beneath the CPU box, 4 plane graphics, an RD53 and 6 MB
> memory.
> 
> After I netboot the machine and disklabel and newfs the disk I get some
> strange messages:
<most of strange messages snipped.  They're basically like the
following:>
> # disklabel -r -w /dev/rrd0a rd53
> 18-->17
> 963-->1024
> 144-->136
> #
> # newfs /dev/rrd0a
> 18-->17
> 963-->1024
> 144-->136
> 18-->17
> 963-->1024
> 144-->136
> Warning: 28 sector(s) in last cylinder unallocated
> /dev/rrd0a:     15884 sectors in 117 cylinders of 8 tracks, 17 sectors
>         7.8MB in 8 cyl groups (16 c/g, 1.06MB/g, 256 i/g)
> super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
>  32, 2240, 4448, 6656, 8864, 11072, 13280, 15488,
> #
> 
> What do these "n-->m" messages mean? Is the disk bad? Should I try
> low-level formatting it from the console monitor?

They mean that the disklabel is wrong and NetBSD has figured out the
correct parameters for the drive and is using them instead.  It seems to
me that you are labeling the drive with the standard MSCP RD53 label. 
You shouldn't be, because the VS2000 MFM controller isn't MSCP and it
wants the physical geometry.  Here are the
specifications: (look at the 1325 column)

                                      Model Number
Unformatted Capacity:   1323     1323A     1324    1324A     1325

  Total Mbytes          42.7      53.3     64.0     74.7     85.3
  Disk Platters            3         3        4        4        5
  Read/Write Heads         4         5        6        7        8
  Cylinders             ------------------ 1024 -----------------
  Bytes per track       ---------------- 10,416 -----------------

Formatted Capacity:

  Total Mbytes          35.6     44.5      53.4     62.3     71.3
  Bytes per Sector      ------------------- 512 -----------------
  Sectors per Track     -------------------- 17 -----------------

(I included these here because it seems Micropolis is dead so you can't
go there and get them.)

I didn't see any message that indicates that the drive isn't okay. 
However, it'd better not have any bad sectors, or you will have problems
because there is no bad sector remapping.  Look out for messages like:
Command 0xNN completed with result code 0xNN
Any such messages (besides those at startup which happen once for each
non-existant drive during the probe) are bad... you are getting data
corruption.

BTW.  Make your partitions use whole cylinders so you don't get that
unused stuff in the last cylinder.

> The bad news: The RD54 in my original VS2K refuses to spin up after I
> had the machine off for a few hours yesterday. The machine was pretty
> warm after living on a cramped shelf for weeks. Maybe the electronics
> were fried in the heat-soak after I powered off? Arrgh, I had lots of
> stuff on that disk and it was working perfectly...

Hmm... I wouldn't give up hope that easily.  It could just be stiction. 
Even if it is electronics, it may be something that is easily
repairable. 

-- 
|  Boris Gjenero <bgjenero@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>              |
|  Home page:  http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bgjenero/     |
|  "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to   |
|  depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, ROTJ  |