*BSD News Article 26727


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
From: mea@brixham.demon.co.uk (Martin Allard)
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!demon!dis.demon.co.uk!brixham.demon.co.uk!mea
Subject: Re: Adaptec 1542CF w/NetBSD 
Distribution: world
References: <MARK.744.2D497A97@ardsley.business.uwo.ca>
Organization: Mallard Concepts Ltd.
Reply-To: mea@brixham.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Simple NEWS 1.90 (ka9q DIS 1.21)
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Date: Mon, 31 Jan 1994 23:56:45 +0000
Message-ID: <760060604snz@brixham.demon.co.uk>
Sender: usenet@demon.co.uk

Grateful thanks to everyone who offered advice about using the
1542CF with NetBSD.  Firstly I changed the ID on my Fujitsu 1Gb
drive to 6 and lo and behold it was recognized.  The delay after
the scsi bus reset is certainly too short.

However the data from the drive was frequently garbled.
I installed screened scsi cables and experimented with terminators.
It works now, but not reliably enough to use.  DOS on the same
hardware is 100% solid.  To my mind this indicates that it is not
really a hardware problem in any true sense.

My guess is that the scsi driver was written to achieve the ultimate
in speed without realizing that it was pushing the hardware close
to the edge of unreliability; in some cases beyond it.

I am going to install NetBSD on a non-scsi drive and have a close
look at that driver.  I promise to report back to this group on
my findings.

Martin Allard
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