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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!pipex!uknet!gdt!aber!fronta.aber.ac.uk!pcg From: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Subject: Re: NetBSD and Maxtor harddrive. In-Reply-To: sun@champs.physci.psu.edu's message of Thu, 1 Jul 1993 14: 13:37 GMT Message-ID: <PCG.93Jul12001801@decb.aber.ac.uk> Sender: news@aber.ac.uk (USENET news service) Nntp-Posting-Host: decb.aber.ac.uk Reply-To: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Organization: Prifysgol Cymru, Aberystwyth References: <C9Houq.Ds9@cs.psu.edu> Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1993 23:18:01 GMT Lines: 28 >>> On Thu, 1 Jul 1993 14:13:37 GMT, sun@champs.physci.psu.edu >>> (God(someday)) said: God(someday)> I am using NetBSD-0.8 and a maxtor 7213AT 202MB God(someday)> harddrive. I think I have a especially nasty problem. When God(someday)> I was installing NetBSD, I had to input all the disk God(someday)> parameters like # of head and # of sec/track...But the God(someday)> installation screws up everytime, giving me error messages God(someday)> like partition c extends beyond boundary... On a SCSI drive the geometry is largely irrelevant. Just tell the config programs that your drive has got 64 blocks/track, 32 tracks/cylinder, and a number of cylinders equal to its capacity in MB. God(someday)> I understand that NetBSD cannot handle disk geometry God(someday)> translations, so I called up maxtor and asked about my God(someday)> disk. It turns out that my disk geometry is translated. God(someday)> But, it has five(!) zones, each with a different God(someday)> sec/track! Ignore all this. When building FFS filesystems just specify an rps of 1 (mkfs <rps>), no rotational latency/interleaving (tunefs -d 0); this will make sure that the FFS will not use certain optimizations don't mix well with the prefetching of modern SCSI drives. Also, make sure that the FFS will cluster IO 8 blocks at a time, which most SCSI controllers (e.g. the 1542) can do (tunefs -a 8).