Misc uport bugs and observations

[Karl Denninger]

In article <1446 at bigtex.uucp> james at bigtex.UUCP (James Van Artsdalen) writes:
>IN article <4387 at b-tech.UUCP>, zeeff at b-tech.UUCP (Jon Zeeff) wrote:
>> Dcopy doesn't seem to work.  A dcopy from one 4096 drive to another seemed to
>> work ok, but fsck found many errors (too many to fix).
>
>Bet you were bit by the dual-drive-failure bug.  To my experience, that bug
>is still with us on the 386: it just doesn't print the error message any more.
>I had trouble with the WD1003 and WD1006: don't have a second drive to test
>the WD1007 with.

Yep; this I have seen on everything from the Televideo systems to a Generic
WA2 to whatever..  The strange thing is that it's not consistant; on one
system it will occur, on another nearly *identical* one it will not.  Strange.
Xenix works great on both, by the way...

>> When using a WD1006-WAH controller, the system will hang if it encounters a
>> drive error.
>
>> Uport unix doesn't seem to reset the disk and try again when it encounters a
>> disk error.
>
>Is this related to the WD1006 problem reported above?  I assume so.

Not necessarially.  Tatung WA2 "compatible" controllers blow up in the same
manner; the system just goes to sleep.  Uport has also done something even
worse to me once or twice; after the first disk error, EVERY WRITE after
that point was junked.  Guess how much of my disk was left by the time I
figured that one out and hit <reset>?

>Be aware that the INSTALL script on the Build disk assumes that if you don't
>have a Televideo, you're using 3:1 interleave.  Dumb assumption with the
>WD1006 or WD1007 (ie, Compaq 386/20 with the 150meg hard disk or PC's Ltd
>with the 300meg drive).  You have to modify the build disk to use 1:1
>interleave and have the bad sectors marked correctly.  Send to address in
>above paragraph for details...

There's more....

>From what I can see if you DO say you have a Televideo the system does some
strange things as well.  CORETEST reports 450K/second transfer when the
Televideo system has been formatted at 1:1 under MSDOS.  You can't prep the
disk low-level under DOS if you're going to use it with UNIX; seems as
though you *MUST* low-level format to get the bad-track table on there
(so says their tech support...  why?).  In any event, the formatter goes 
ahead and uses 2:1 interleave, with NO CHOICE! AARRGGHHH!!!!  Only 
240K/second transfer rate results, 1/2 what the system is capable of.

It would be nice if we could use the nicities of the hardware....

----
Karl Denninger                 |  Data: +1 312 566-8912
Macro Computer Solutions, Inc. | Voice: +1 312 566-8910
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