ADAMGOOD@delphi.com wrote:

> I don't know if you recognize it, but that's the same error I got when I
> was trying to put BSD on a Jaz disk.  What an enormous pain in the ass.
> After trying for three days (literally) I gave up.

This is part of the reason why I suspect something screwy in the MI SCSI
driver...hmmm...what kind of kernel are you using?  Is it ncrscsi or sbc?
I've heard that sbc kernels are better for zip/jaz drives, but I don't
know from experience.  Of course, getting an sbc version of Takashi's
kernel (if it's not already) is going to be the hard part ;-)

> I did find that that panic stopped happening when I used the /sbin/swapon
> from the 1.2 distribution.  Then it gave me some new errors.  I eventually
> gave up.

If I remember correctly, the swap configuration can be one of those things
that's kernel dependent, but what error messages did you get?  Do you
remember?

> On a related note, the Jaz disk is a bitch to work with for several reasons.
> First of all, no good partitioning software exists.  I was using APS 4.0.2
> and it was a mess.  The APS driver replaces the Iomega driver when you
> partion the disk (what was Apple smoking when they decided to put drivers
> for the disks on the disks themselves?  Or am I not understanding what
> happens here?).  That makes it so that the Iomega driver doesn't load
> when you have that disk installed.  Then when you boot into MacBSD, the
> disk is auto ejected (with no way to stop this from happening), because
> the mechanism to prevent auto eject at shutdown is a function of the Iomega
> driver.  So you have to hurry up and push the Jaz disk back into the drive
> before the kernel scans the SCSI devices.

Really?  I thought that partitioning it with a normal formatter prevented
the system from detecting that it's ejectable.  Perhaps APS 4.0.2 is doing
some strange stuff.  Have you tried the patched version of Apple's HDSC
setup?  I here some good things about it...

[snip]

> Then I had grief with (what I suspect) was Mkfs.  I got the new 1.45 and
> reformatted my old 'fixed' hard disk which had been trashed in various
> attempts to deal with the Jaz BSD.  I had a root and a usr partition.
> When I first mounted the usr partition (before installing anything on it),
> I get a message telling me it's not clean and to f-ck it (errr . . . fsck
> it).

This is because running Mkfs on it does not set the clean flag.  You need
to run fsck after you create a new partition in order to make sure that it
formatted correctly and to set the clean flag.

> When I did a 'df' on it (before 'fsck'ing) it showed that several
> hundred thousand blocks had already been allocated, but I had just 'newfs'ed
> it from the Mac side.  Hmmm . . .  I 'newfs'ed it again from the BSD side,
> and this time 'df' showed that the partition was indeed empty.

Kinda strange....did you run 'fsck' and then look, or did you just go and
'newfs' it?

> Then I began to notice another problem;  Everytime 'mount' mounts root, it
> tells me that the partition is not clean and to fsck it.  It will even do
> this immediately after I've fscked it and it's marked the partition clean.
> This happens repeatably.

Of course it does.  Have you actually shutdown the machine?  If you do a
'shutdown -h' or 'shutdown -r', it will sync the discs and mark them clean
before it halts or reboots.  If you don't shutdown the machine (i.e. it
locks up or you just turn the power off), the filesystem will be "dirty"
when it comes up the next time.  The reason that 2 successive fsck's show
that the partition isn't clean is because when you fsck the in kernel
filesystem state is _no longer in sync_ with the real filesystem state.
This is why it is usually a good idea to do a 'reboot -n' after having
cleaned up major filesystem damage or anytime you are forced to work on a
partition that is mounted read/write.  Does this make sense?

> In case anyone needs to know, I'm running this on a PB160 w/ 12MB RAM on
> an external 800MB Quantum hard disk with additioinal adventures on an
> external Jaz drive.  My kernel is Takashi's powermanager w/ intvid build
> from 1/9/97.  The newer ones from July '97 that Takashi has posted on his
> web page don't boot (sorry Takashi) on my PB.  The rest of the distribution
> is the 1.2.1 binaries.

Where does the boot fail?

> Oh, one thing I forgot - in addition to the mount root/not clean problem,
> when I try to use the installer on that disk, and I do an 'ls' it says
> something about bad inodes and dies.  Not a good sign, but that doesn't
> happen once I'm in BSD, so I used 'hfs' to copy all the tarballs to the
> BSD side and installed them from there.

Hmmm....bad inode or no such inode?  I get some kind of "no such file"
type error all the time in the Installer, but it doesn't crash...I'd
recommend using hfs anyway, though.  It's _alot_ faster than the
Installer.

> This has been an EXTERMELY frustrating waste of three days.  I hope this
> experience is useful to someone.

I'm sorry it's going so poorly.  Hopefully something I've said above will
help some.

> Upon reflection, I probably should've changed the subject: field on this
> message, but my mail reader won't let me now.  Ooops.  Sorry Colin.

Don't worry about it.  It's good to get it all out sometimes.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.