by I've been reading this group for a few months (plus the FAQ's) and finally
took the Linux plunge (first on a spare parts PC, then I ditched my DOS
I'm DOS CLEAN!!)
My configuration includes a 486DX33 w/AMI bios, 16MB RAM, Future Domain
TMC880 controller, Maxtor 7245 SCSI driver, Conner 162MB IDE,
Sony CDU541 CDROM and a 3com
3c503 board.
Everything has gone well on the install even no clock tuning in X386,
except for my SCSI disk drive. When I run "fdisk /dev/sda" it gives me
an impossible number of sectors. It claims the geometry is 4 heads,
1944 cylinders and 72 sectors, which fdisk doesn't like. (It is also
incorrect these settings make the disk out to be 286MB, but it's only
a 245MB). So, I changed the number of sectors manually to 60, which seemed
reasonable. I made a large partition, then rebooted. Upon reboot,
everything looks okay. Then I did "mke2fs /dev/sda1" looked good, until
I got massive numbers of bad sectors. I then rebooted again, and my
partition was gone! So, I tried running "fdisk /dev/sda" again and
fdisk told me that there was a SCSI read error on cylinder 0. I checked
and rechecked the termination, cables (I had a bad one for awhile) and
I/O addresses. There were no problems. I rebooted again, reset heads/
cylinders/sectors and everything was okay again. Ran the mke2fs again,
and it didn't work again (and my disk was thrashed again after the next
reboot). I've also tried a CDC94155 SCSI disk and had similar problems
(but I got NO geometry readings out of it). (My fdisk is 0.93, kernel
is 99pl12 and SLS is 1.03).
Am I missing something really basic? I thought geometries for SCSI really
didn't matter, as long as one made sure it was smaller (or equal) to the
actual disk capacity. I hope I didn't miss a FAQ along the way. I've
got about 10 of them around and couldn't really find much useful.
Thank you for any information.
Nathan D. Lane, MIS Analyst and VP of Triicon Systems, Inc.
Making the Title Insurance World an Easier Place!