On Tue, 3 Dec 2002 Robertdkeys@aol.com wrote:

> I was fooling around on a VS3100M38, using it to format some drives I
> had laying around.  It could handle drives up to 2 gig, but could not
> seem to do test 75 formats on anything larger than that (like 4 gig
> drives).  What drive size hardware limitations are there in the 3100
> class machines that one might need to be aware of?

Try seeing what a "show dev" gives you from the console prompt.  I know
the firmware in my MV3100 sees drives up to 4095MB correctly, but
anything over that and it wraps around.  I've not bothered to low-level
format any of my drives as there's usually not a need to do that.  I do
have a couple of 4148MB drives which show up as being 53MB in size from
the console.  However, the NetBSD drivers deal with them fine.  You'll
likely need a smaller drive (1GB? 2GB?) for your boot/root filesystem.

The VAX/VMS folks will tell you that you can't use the larger disks,
but that's just a limitation in their OS. :-)

Oh, and I *think* there's a difference between the way NetBSD/vax 1.5.x
and NetBSD/vax 1.6 deal with the larger drives.  When I first moved from
1.5.3 to 1.6, 1.6 thought the filesystem on my 4148MB drive was dirty.
The fsck proceeded to delete /all/ of the data off that drive as it
*fixed* it.  Conversely, this past weekend when I booted to 1.5.3 for a
short while, 1.5.3 thought the filesytem I'd created on the large disk
with 1.6 was dirty.  Booting back into 1.6, everything looked fine.
I need to investigate that a little more thoroughly.

-brian.