On Fri, 8 Dec 1995, John P. Wittkoski wrote:

> David,
> You know, the problems you seem to be experiencing remind me of some problems
> I had when the termination on my drives was incorrect or my SCSI cables were
> going bad.


> Do you have a MacOS partition on the same drive as NetBSD? Do you have
> problems with that partition at all? In my experience, NetBSD fsck is
> not nearly as tolerant as the MacOS can be, so you may not be seeing the
> problem on the MacOS side.

Three MacOS Partitions, two before, one after, I think.

> Someone may have mentioned this before, but have you double checked your
> termination settings and/or tried a different SCSI cable? Termination tends
> to be somewhat of a black art, and in my experience the Mac hardware can 
> often tolerate the wrong termation settings, so that it appears to work most
> of the time, but gives flakey results other times.
> 
> 	--John

I haven't really thought much about it.  It's one of those apple 
pass-thru terminators on one drive port and the cable connected to the 
other.  The cable is the Apple Powerbook's factory cable.  It seems 
pretty sturdy, about twice as thick as my other SCSI cable (the one with 
the standard SCSI 25-pin on the other end.  Should I be sending the signal 
through the pass-through terminator or do I have it correctly connected 
to the second SCSI connector on the external drive?  (It's a PowerBook, 
so no internal drives except the Quantum 40 Meg.)  The external drive 
supposedly has no internal termination, afaik.

Strange thing, when I use the drive with my PowerMac, the mkfs and 
installer programs give "Error on SCSIread(), #5 at mount time.  I 
don't know if that's significant.  Mkfs says it's probably just a phase 
error... which might be, if it only happened once....  Mkfs also says 
that 218 sectors in the last cylinder are unallocated.

Here's what I got before the mkfs.

modesense page 4(5)
Error on SCSIRead(), # 5
Probably just a phase error, ignore it THIS TIME.
Num Heads 4
Num Cylinders = 2853
modesense page 3(5)
Bytes_Sector is 512
Sectors Track is 118

I'm going to start clean again, this time I'm going to select NO under 
fsck.  We'll see.

Any ideas?

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