Last night, while reviving my 4000/200, I was trying to give my VAX a nice
disk.  I've got a CMD qbus scsi controller which seems to work dandy -
except for one item.  It doesn't seem to like larger disks.  I started
with an RZ55, although I either need jumper wisdom or the drive is dead
(didn't spin up, couldn't see the drive anywhere on the bus).  Trying with
a spare 9GB seagate (an older, FH drive), it was probed no problem, but
gave media errors (the disk _does_ work).  I tried another 9GB drive of
exactly the same model - no go, it failed in exactly the same manner.

Soon after I tried a 1GB Seagate (a bit more modern).  No problems
there.  Unfortunately, the SCSI gods disliked me for some reason, and
caused me to knock the drive off the top of my VAX while it was
running.  Whir, click.  Whir, click.  Click.  And now the 1GB is no more
:-(

I got it working beautifully with an _old_ 300MB HP drive.  It makes more
noise than a small honda, but it does seem to work okay.

Is the CMD controller just picky?  All of these drives have worked in
sparcs, i386 and alpha machines no problem.  The 9GB drive was pulled from
a working RAID array.  I figured maybe the CMD controller was just too
picky about timing, maybe geometry (although it shouldn't
matter) etc... but backwards compatibility with SCSI is one thing I've
never had a problem with.

Any ideas?

NetBSD did pick up the 300MB drive as ra0 when netbooting.  Groovy.

-Jon
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 "Hey - this old machine screams like a snail on acid!" - (a true
  comment by a fellow who recently installed NetBSD on an old server)