HP97549T/DS5000 story

[Rice Don D]

After a great amount of fooling around, I've got the HP drive running on
a DS5000/Ultrix 4.0.  When it was connected, the Ultrix boot would always
die after printing:
  SCSI bus 0: command aborted (#0), ID = 1, cmd = 0x48
  SCSI bus 0: resetting bus (#2)
I finally figured out that the 0x48 command it was complaining about was a
"pseudo-opcode" to start or stop the unit (/sys/io/scsi/mips/scsivar.h) and
eliminating the SCSI_STARTUNIT flag from the drive's description in scsi_data.c
allows the system to boot up with the drive.  Based on conversations with other
HP drive owners, I think firmware was revised to deal with this opcode but I've
got an older revision (9026).

After making a new filesystem on the A partition, I tried using chpt -a to load
the partition table that I had put in scsi_data.c, for the drive.  However,
chpt -q showed the table:
partition     bottom        top        size       overlap
    a              0      32767       32768       b,c,d,e,f,g,h
    b              0          0           0       a,c,d,e,f,g,h
    c              0    1956863     1956864       a,b,d,e,f,g,h
    d              0          0           0       a,b,c,e,f,g,h
    e              0          0           0       a,b,c,d,f,g,h
    f              0          0           0       a,b,c,d.e,g,h
    g              0          0           0       a,b,c,d,e,f,h
    h              0          0           0       a,b,c,d,e,f,g
Questions:
1) This isn't the partition table I put into "sz_rz49_sizes"...why not, and
   where is this one coming from?  It isn't the generic sz_rzxx_sizes, and
   during boot this drive, rz1, was correctly shown as being an RZ49, my bogus
   drive type.
2) Where is the 1956864 sector size coming from?  The drive data book says
   it has 1994720 sectors total, 1953792 sectors after formatting.  I'd like
   to know where the other 3072 sectors reported about are coming from.
Anyway, I made filesystems, mounted them, loaded lots of stuff on them, and
it seems to be behaving.  I've got a nagging suspicion that I'll regret using
the 1956864 figure in repartitioning the drive, rather than the smaller
total given in the manual.
If anyone has any words of wisdom to share, I'd like to hear them.
Thanks,
Don Rice                                  Internet: fnddr at acad3.fai.alaska.edu
Geophysical Institute                     E-mail:   fnddr at alaska.bitnet
University of Alaska                      Phone:    (907) 474-7569
Fairbanks, AK 99775                       Loran:    64.86N 212.16E