Wren IV, and general hard drive setup

[Dave Olson]

In <1990Aug1.133136.4621 at jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> rodney at dgp.toronto.edu (Rodney Hoinkes) writes:


| 	We are looking into purchasing a few of these drives (Wren IV)
| 	for our IRIS's but we are uncertain as to the requirements of
| 	hooking them up to primarily Personal Iris's, but potentially
| 	a 70GT as well.
| 
| 	On the PI, is it simply a matter of hooking it into the SCSI
| 	port, plugging it into the wall (it's own power supply), and
| 	sicking fx onto it?  Does anyone know if device drivers exist
| 	for this drive (320Meg) ?
| 
| 	On the GT, we have little idea of what is required for hookup.
| 	We currently have a 380Meg ESDI drive and controller, but hinv
| 	also says we have a WD33C93 SCSI controller.
| 
| 	Any technical help would be appreciated.
| 

You are on the right track with fx.  The Wren IV has been shipped on
all of the 4D platforms, and is a fairly reliable drive.  There have
been a few firmware revs on this drive with problems that show up
primarily on the PI (or the IO3 board) due to the higher transfer
rates.

Start up fx as 'fx -x' since you need to be in expert mode.  Since you
have a non-SGI drive anyway, just use the 'auto' choice.  This will set
parameters to default values, format the drive, create a partition
table, and write it out.  You should then be able to make a filesytem
on it with mkfs or 'Add_disk', add it to your fstab, and away you go.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.