Howdy

I installed NetBSD 0.9 and had some strange experiences that seem to be
hardware related.  I installed the binary release on a 200 meg IDE drive which
was configured as drive 0.  The whole drive was dedicated to NetBSD.  A 130 meg
IDE drive is configured as drive 1 and has an active DOS partion.  During the
loading of some of the distribution files from floppy drive A I received an
error on the console.  It said something like not on cylinder 0 continuing on
cylinder 1.  Unfortunately I did not write it down.  Everything continued to
work okay.  I rebooted DOS from a floppy drive and went about editing its
startup, etc.  I went to reboot to test the edits and the system passed the
power on self-tests then issued a message "Read Error".  I removed the floppy
and tried to boot NetBSD off of hard drive 0.  Again read error.

I rebooted off another DOS floppy and the system came up.  The DOS FDISK
utility shows the correct information for hard drive 0 but for hard drive 1 it
reports a cylinder count 1 less than the total.  I booted NetBSD off of floppy
and wd0 sometimes shows up and sometimes it doesn't.  wd1 always shows up with
the correct drive info.  I was able to mount wd0 and look at files.  I took
hard drive 1 and connected it to another DOS machine and the drive is fine.

Apparently cylinder 0 on both the floppy disk and hard drive 0 have become
hosed.  The floppy drive which got hosed I did a "SYS A:" on and it was
bootable again.  This seems like a controller problem but I'm not sure.  I
didn't have any problems prior to the NetBSD installation.

Have y'all heard of anything like this?  Any suggestions you may be able to
provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Danny Sheaffer
danny@dir.texas.gov
 

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