ISC 3.2/harddisk & floppy problems

[Raymond Nijssen]

gemini at geminix.in-berlin.de (Uwe Doering) writes:
>rcbarn at rwc.urc.tue.nl (Raymond Nijssen) writes:
>>
>>The second problem, the one with the HD controller locking up under ISC
>>is known to occur in combination with Western Digital's WD1006Vsr2 RLL
>>controller; it contains a bug which only occurs if 2 drives are
>>attached to it and if the HD device driver has the 'overlapped-seeks' 
>>feature enabled, like the one in ISC/ix has by default. It does not
>>happen with ESDI.

>Not so fast, please. That CCAP_NOSEEK fix may be a cure for some problems
>people have with ISC's HD driver, but not for all.

Sure, but the original posting was about lockups occurring when two
drives were accessed simultaneously. As far as I know, this fix is only
useful to circumvene a bug in some WD1006Svr2 controllers.

>I had problems for months with the following HD/controller combination:
>[...]
>Adaptec 2322D ESDI controller
>Fujitsu 2249E ESDI HD drive (320 MB formatted)

>[ .... lots of detailed info omitted .... ]

Hear! Hear! This is the degree of detail useful to all of us.

> After experiencing all that, I don't have any other choice but to 
> suspect that this is a bug in ISC's HD driver.

Maybe, maybe not: when I had troubles with my WD1006, I decided to go
for Adaptec's 2372 rev. C. I tried 2 (well, actually 3, but one was
DOA) of them, and both did not work as expected, each in a different
way however. I was quite mad at Adaptec at that time, especially when
I got piles of reactions from other people on the net who had similar
experiences with this revision (rev. B seemed to work fine). 
Some months thereafter, it turned out that there was a bug in my
C&T AMI clone-motherboard as my newly purchased Wangtek tape streamer 
controller caused the system to hang (even without panic message) under
ISC, not under AT&T unix though. 
It might very well be that the Adaptec controllers were not to blame for
the problems I had with them.

-Raymond
-- 
| Raymond X.T. Nijssen  | Eindhoven Univ. of Technology                       |
| raymond at es.ele.tue.nl | EH 7.13, PO 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands |
| "Don't put that on the wall in a tax-payer supported museum!"  Pat Buchanan |