Microport System V/386 install woes

[Greg Hackney 214+464-2771]

In article <489 at micropen> dave at micropen.UUCP writes:
>In article <26531 at clyde.ATT.COM>, wtr at moss.ATT.COM writes:
>> In article <1984 at sugar.UUCP> karl at sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer)
>> writes:
>> >I'm helping a friend of mine who owns a computer store try
>> to install $1200 worth of Microport software on a 386/20 clone.
>> It has three meg of RAM and an 80 meg Seagate drive. 
>> 
>> >First off, the surface analysis program doesn't work.  It bombs.
>> 
>> If you are going with the the seagate drive, try using the seagate
>> DISKMANAGER software (not actually seagate's, but they distribute it
>> with their drives) boot dos and use this to do your low level & bad
>> block scan.  this tends to make installation a lot easier.  this is
>
> NOT TAKE THIS ADVICE!!!!!!
>Only on SV/AT (ie 286) is the dos bad sector mapping scheme used under
>UNIX.  On SV/386, the AT vtoc virtual disk mapping scheme is used for
>greater SV compatibility.  At first I criticized Microport (ie Interactive)
>for this but on second thought: I don't trust DOS bad sector mapping for S&%#.
>The bad sector mappings are very different and incompatible.
>Pedestrian advice is dangerous to your system's health.

I used the DiskManager to initialize my Seagate 4096 drive, and didn't
have any problems. I think here's the reasons why....

The DM software is designed to work with both DOS partitions, and Xenix
and Interactive Unix. I used DM only to do the hardware format, not a
surface analysis.  Also, I don't have any DOS partitions. I used the
uPort surface scan, and it used the mkpart commands to build the Volume
Table of Contents (VTOC).

My system has run for a month...no errors. But just to try uPort
out, I rebuilt the disk using nothing but the uPort tools to format and
partition it, and it runs just as well, no problems so far.

Several people are amazed that mine runs with no disk errors. I have heard
comments like, it's because you aren't running DOS-Merge and don't have
DOS partitions, and, it really is taking errors, you just don't know it.
But, I have done quite a few disk xfers with sum checks coming out okay.

The writers problem with the 4096 drive sounds like a controller or
setup configuration problem rather that a uPort problem.

-- 
Greg