Sparc Help

[David A. Sinck]

\_ SMTP quoth George Toft on 3/22/2001 23:18 as having spake thusly:
\_
\_ I have a Sparc2 with Red Hat 5.2 installed.  The hard drive is correctly
\_ identified if I type "probe-scsi" at the prom ok prompt, but it hangs
\_ when I try to boot from the drive.
\_ 
\_ I suspect a bad drive.  It spins up, prom identifies it, but the Red
\_ Hat installer won't read from it.  I've set the jumper for termination,
\_ and that did nothing.

Is it scsi id 0?  At least in x86 land, your boot drive needs to be
zero.  Unless that's changed in the real world...it hasn't changed in
mine.  :-)

If you have another scsi chain handy, plug the drive into it and see
what kind of mileage you get.  I once recovered data off of NTFS this
way.  The box cratered (suprise), I chained the drive into my dual
boot...NT wedged (suprise [1]) so I said, wtf, let's give the dev
kernel w/ NTFS support a whirl..."would you like fries with that
data?"  They let me crow about how my free replacement was better for
about a week vefore they told me they had had enough of it.

David
[1] This is probably on account of NT being stupid and auto labeling
its drives for you in a bass ackwards way: it goes breadth first
across the "hard" disk drives, then comes back for more.  

eg: one drive, the null span:
c: hda1, d: hda2, e: hda3  ... x: cdrom 

eg: two drives:
c: hda1, d: hdb1, e: hda2, f: hdb2, ... x: cdrom

eg: three drives:
c: hda1, d: hdb1, e: hdc1, .... x: cdrom

So what's the problem, I hear you ask?  What if you don't install your
OS on C:?  I had it on D:, with apps/transfer space on C:.  With the
second drive in there... D: wasn't hda2 any more it was hdb1...no OS
found, *poof* bluescreen.

I actually figured this out sometime later as I was installing NT on a
different box in another company.... a box with a zip drive.  Install
didn't see it, and I did the OS on D: again.  Service pack install to
latest and greatest saw it...and added it as hdb, of "hard" disk
nature (as opposed to cd drives which are ignored for this).  Now all
of a sudden, no boot after service pack install, also because D:
wasn't pointing to hda2 anymore.

Brainchild idea that spanning idea was.  *sigh*