re: bigtime trouble with the Zip disk.....

Jim,
     Yep, I've been there too!  And, yes, its the Zip and the fact that
the driver in the standard kernel (I tried 1.2 here on a IIci).  Big 
problems!  Actually, I tried it on a SE/30, IIx, and IIci.  All were big
failures and a dramatic waste of time!  :)  Scott says to use a SBC
GENERIC kernel #36 or something like that but I don't have the
foggiest idea where the devil to find it and never bothered with it
after wasting so much time already.  Oh, I should say that I did 
finally get a working NetBSD 1.2 on the Zip, but sorry to say that
I forget what the magic was....its related to the fact that the mkfs
sees the device differently than the installed system does.  In other
words, mkfs sees a different disk organization (heads, sectors, etc)
than the kernel thinks it is when you finally get around to booting
it.  Thats why the fs is eternally corrupt according to the running
kernel.  I'll try to dig around and find the messages where the 
secret that worked for me will be found....if I find it, I'll send it along
to you.  I believe it was using a different number of sectors when
building the fs than mkfs wants to use; you have to override the
settings if I remember right thats what did the trick for me.

Paul

>
>Now here's where the fun begins.  I've tried to 1)Boot into multi-user 
>mode directly, and 2)Reboot using the reboot -n command, then start the 
>booter from the MacOS.  
>
>In the first case, it usually gets into multi-user 
>mode.  But that also leaves me with at least one utility (ls, man, vi, cd, 
>etc.) dumping core.  This leads me to believe that the fs is still 
>corrupt.  If I shutdown and go into single user mode again, the fs 
>is clean sometimes, and other times not.  So start all over with the 
>fsck thing...
>
>In the second case (reboot -n after fixing the fs), starting into 
>multi-user mode usually fails, 'cause the fsck_ffs -p command says 
>the file system isn't clean! Argh!!!  Fix the fs, mount the fs, and 
>go into multi-user mode where something usually goes wrong.  The only 
>time that it went directly into multi-user mode without failing the 
>fsck, it got caught up in an endless login loop.
>
>My gut feeling is that somthing is wrong on the ZIP disk or in the 
>ZIP drive, but I'm not sure.  I've read so many different things 
>that I don't really know which way is up.  Anyway, if anybody out 
>there has any ideas other than "get a new hard drive" I'd be 
>glad to hear them.
>
>-Jim
>	
>The views expressed are mine, and do not represent those 
>of JPL or any agents of JPL.
>___________________________________________________________________
>Jim Kreuziger                        Politics: From the latin poly,  
>Jet Propulsion Laboratory            meaning many, and tics, 
>phone:  (626) 306-6605 work          meaning bloodsucking parasites.
>e-mail: jimk@dareangel.jpl.nasa.gov  
>___________________________________________________________________