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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.uoregon.edu!symiserver.symantec.com!news.central.com!news From: tedmtoybox@agora.rdrop.com Subject: Re: ESDI drive woes X-Newsreader: IBM RN 3.8d (OS/2 2.0) bugfixed by mittelst@fh-ulm.de Sender: news@news.central.com (Usenet Netnews) Organization: Peter Norton Group, Symantec Corp. Beaverton Message-ID: <DDy96s.CDI@news.central.com> Date: Sun, 27 Aug 1995 03:07:52 GMT Lines: 43 In <id.MLSM1.JMD@nmti.com> peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: | OK, I'm trying for the umpteenth time to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 on an | ESDI drive. | | Drive is formatted with Disk Manager. | | Apparently when Disk Manager sees a bad sector, it "spares" the whole track. | Unfortunately, FreeBSD doesn't know where to find the spare track, or the | spare track is unformatted. Disk Manager won't format outside the official | data space on the drive. | | When bad144 sees a spare track, it eats all 35 of the sectors on it and | it doesn't take many defects to beat the maximum of 126 defects per | partition at that rate. | | The controller is an HP special. It looks like a WD1007 but doesn't appear | to have a BIOS accessible through DEBUG, so I can't use the WD sector | sparing even if I wanted to. | I've got one of those types of ESDI controllers built around a WD chip in my Compaq. It is a Compaq special. I think WD was doing that with ESDI controllers for a while. Basically, what is going on is that the normal ESDI BIOS is being replaced by BIOS code that resides on the boot track of the hard disk. Usually, when you set up an ESDI drive in that kind of controller you have to low-level format the hard disk with a proprietary program that writes the controller chip setup code to the hard disk when it low-levels it. I think they do that to save a nickel on a PROM chip. In your case, it looks like they got OnTrack to write their dirty little setup program for them. Fortunately for me, I don't use that particular machine for FreeBSD, but for OS/2 and it runs on it. My BSD machine is a "normal" IDE drive machine. I recommend that you scrap the controller and replace it with an ESDI controller with a real BIOS chip on it. At my site we have dozens of ESDI controllers in the junk room, you could probably find a similar situation in any computer junkyard. That way you can format the disk with or without sector sparing.