Hi !

maybe it's a little bit off-topic, but after trying to get a hard disk running
on my VAXstation 3100 (m30) and VAXstation 3100 m76 many times for no, i must
ask here in hope to get some information.

First: how "usable" is SCSI on those boxes at the moment ? I get some write
errors when trying to "newfs" a partition. Directly after disklabel or after
booting, "newfs /dev/rsd0d" (or other device) results in:

write error: 155231
wtfs: Undefined error: 0

The second try results in:

/dev/rsd0d:     155232 sectors in 588 cylinders of 8 tracks, 33 sectors
        75.8MB in 37 cyl groups (16 c/g, 2.06MB/g, 992 i/g)
        super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:write error: 224
        wtfs: Undefined error: 0

with other partitions it writes some superblocks and stops at about sector
30000 with the above error.

super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 32, 4304, 8576, 12848, 17120, 21392, 25664,write error: 30048
 wtfs: Undefined error: 0

My disklabel partitions look like this at the moment:

  a:    15884        0     unused     1024  8192         # (Cyl.    0 - 60*)
  b:    33440    16104       swap                        # (Cyl.   61 - 187*)
  c:   204864        0     unused     1024  8192         # (Cyl.    0 - 775)
  d:   155232    49632     4.2BSD      512  4096    16   # (Cyl.  188 - 775)
  g:   155232    49632     unused     1024  8192         # (Cyl.  188 - 775)

This is a little bit as seen for wther fixed disks in /etc/disktab, other
tries were simply a: full disk and c: full disk (a: with FSType)

What is the correct way to partition a disk, what is the correct filesystem to
use, or simply: where can i find documentation about this ?

BTW: newfs works with "/dev/sd0d", CD-ROM also works find, and maybe with a
CD-ROM connected to the SCSI bus even the hard disks work more stable.

Drives are RZ23E and RZ23L-E in my boxes, but if it works, i want to put
a 2 GB Quantum Fireball or Seagate Hawk in it, so i can really work with the
VAXen. Network-root is not really good for the right performance, and if it
only WORKS with SCSI (even with no DMA, i think that's the problem at the
current versions) kernel development might do much more fun :-)

So, who has such a config running stable and can tell me a little bit about
disklabels or where can i find a documentation about this (the manpages don't
tell much about it, i only heard about c: being configured as the whole disk)

So long... Michael