Subject: Re: SBC probs
To: The Great Mr. Kurtz [David A. Gatwood] <davagatw@mars.utm.edu>
From: John P. Wittkoski <jpw@netscape.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 08/30/1996 17:32:23
The Great Mr. Kurtz [David A. Gatwood] wrote:

> To throw in another POV, I've had similar problems with my brand-spanking-
> new (Quantum) internal drive on my PB145, both with NCRSCSI and sbc,
> but the drive checks out fine.  Redoing mkfs makes the problem go away for
> about a week and then it returns in full force, with a list of literally
> hundreds of bad blocks in fsck.  I haven't checked the syslog, so I don't
> know if the problems are recorded there or not, but the sheer quantity of
> errors would suggest that either 1. the hardware is failing on 40, 50,
> 60+ percent of its reads (which would undoubtedly show up under MacOS as
> well),

I have noticed on my system that NetBSD seems to be less tolerant 
of SCSI chain problems (impedence problem with old cables, and 
termination issues) than MacOS is, although I don't know why 
this might be the case.

I was having problems at one point and found out that the problem was
actually the old CABLE I was using. It worked ok under MacOS, but 
tended to not work as well under NetBSD.

The moral of my story is: don't buy cheap SCSI cables (or trust old
ones), and make sure that your SCSI chain is terminated properly.

	--John