Add-on disk drives for MicroVaxes

[Mark Lanzo]

As a person who is NOT a Unix wizard, I cast a plea for help out to the net!

Specifically, I am wondering if there is anyone out there who has experience
installing and operating external hard disk drives on MicroVaxes, where the
drive is not a DEC drive.  I have a System Industries model 9722 disk drive,
which I am using on a MicroVax II system running Ultrix (-32m?).

My problem is that I do not know precisely how to go about setting up the 
disk for proper operation.  I would like to set up the disk so that most
of the disk space is used for regular user files, and a smaller portion of
it be set aside for swapping purposes.  I have the disk up and apparently
working for regular user file storage, although I question whether or not
it's really working correctly.  The disk is supposed to have a capacity of
160 Meg (unformatted), however by the time formatting et al are done, I
seem to only get about 100 Meg worth of real storage.  This strikes me as
an excessive loss, but I do not know how to check the validity of this.
I also do not understand Unix'es disk-partitioning scheme.  I have set up
an entry in /etc/disktab to define the drive parameters, and used 'newfs'
to build a filing system on the disk, although I didn't know precisely what
I was doing.  Newfs did its thing, but gave me warning messages about a
"partition table" which overrode "/etc/disktab".  I defined partitions
a,b, and c on the drive.  I also tried to use "swapon" to enable swapping
on the disk (using its "b" partition), but "swapon" invariably responds
with "/dev/ra4b: No such device".  /dev/ra4b does exist; /dev/ra4a thru
/dev/ra4h were apparently all generated automatically for me when I
used "/dev/MAKEDEV", so I don't understand what "swapon" is trying to 
tell me.  I regret that my documentation (to use the term loosely :-) )
doesn't shed any light on the situation, not even to the extent of 
telling me what the diagnostic messages mean.


I would greatly appreciate any help that anyone can provide me with.
Please send any replies by direct e-mail.

        Thanks in advance,
            Mark


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