Need help installing NDR3380 in a Sun-2

[Dave Mack]

I recently bought a pair of NDR3380 SCSI drives in the hope of installing
them in my Sun-2/120. I've been having a little trouble and would
appreciate any advice.

I'm running 3.2 on my Sun. The installation package knows about two types
of disk controllers: the Adaptec ACB-4000 (SCSI-ST506) and the Emulex
MD-21 (ESDI). I'm currently running the Adaptec. Since the NDR3380
controller is a SCSI-RLL job, I hoped that I could hook it up directly to
the SCSI bus and pretend that it was an Emulex.

I attempted to load the OS from tape using the standard installation
procedures and the configuration specified by NDR for the disk. I was able
to format and scan the disk (with intermittent SCSI tape errors st: error
9088), partition, and dump miniUnix onto the 'b' partition.  When setup
tried to rewrite the partition data, the system locked up.  I rebooted and
restarted the installation from scratch. It failed to pass the surface
scan repeatedly, but diag was unable to find any bad blocks through
read/write.

One possible explanation for the problems: the NDR controller reserves
track 0 of the disk for storage of controller parameters. These parameters
are written to disk every time a SCSI mode select is done with the proper
data. The SunOS SCSI disk driver (presumably including the PROM version)
expects to find the partitioning data on track 0. The NDR controller may
be overwriting the partition data every so often. According to NDR, there
is no way to prevent the controller from writing on track 0. I'm not sure
if there's a workaround in SunOS, but I'm dubious.

I'm a total neophyte in the hardware world. Has anyone else gotten one of
these beasts to run in a Sun? Do I need an Emulex controller? Is there any
way to tell SunOS to look for its partition data somewhere else?  Am I out
of luck?

Thanks very much,
Dave Mack
uunet!inco!mack