SUMMARY: Formating Barracuda under Solaris 2.5.1

Paul Kanz (paul@icx.com)
Fri, 18 Apr 1997 10:04:50 -0700 (PDT)

My original question:

> I'm trying to format a 2.1Gb Seagate Barracuda (ST32171N) under Solaris
> 2.5.1 without any luck. The workstation is a Sparc10 with a Ross 125
> cpu, a SBus SFE FWSCSI card and 2 ST32171N (attached to mother board
> SCSI). I was able to install Solaris 2.5.1 on sd3 without any problem.
> But when it comes time to format sd1, format hangs at pass 0.
>
> I've installed the February 2.5.1_Recommended patch bundle.
>
> Any clues what is causing this or what patches might fix this.

Solution:

Changed the SCSI ID for the non-boot drive from 1 to 0 and swapped drive
bays for the disks (put the boot drive in bay disk0 and the non-boot drive
in bay disk1). I'm thinking it was solved by the SCSI ID change, rather
then swapping bays, but...

Thanks to:

Justin Young <justiny@cluster.engr.subr.edu>
FLOYD, RANDALL D. <FLOYDR@nebeng.otis.com>

Responses:

>From justiny@cluster.engr.subr.edu Fri Apr 18 09:43:35 1997
>Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 19:33:10 -0500 (CDT)
>From: Justin Young <justiny@cluster.engr.subr.edu>
>To: Paul Kanz <paul@icx.com>
>Subject: Re: Formating Barracuda under Solaris 2.5.1
>
>Sorry, Paul. The only advice I can give is to try SCSI id 0. (Unless
>you already have a drive at that #). I take it your controller is at
>#7.0
>
>I have two of those disks but they're on an ultra so that doesn't count.

>From FLOYDR@nebeng.otis.com Fri Apr 18 09:43:45 1997
>Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 09:22:00 -0400
>From: "FLOYD, RANDALL D." <FLOYDR@nebeng.otis.com>
>To: Paul Kanz <paul@icx.com>
>Subject: RE: Formating Barracuda under Solaris 2.5.1
>
>Paul,
>
>Have you seen the discussions on sunsolve.sun.com about problems with
>the Barracuda and Tagged Command Queuing? I have a new Ultra that came
>with the same hard drive you are talking about, and I had quite a few
>similar problems. My problems went away with experimenting with some
>scsi_options settings in the /etc/system file. I had varying results
>with the settings, but the ones that totally disabled tagged queuing
>seemed to have the most affect. The following section is a brief
>description of the settings I experimented with:
>
>To change to the slower asynchronous data rate, add the following line
>to /etc/system file:
>
> set scsi_options = 0x58 then reboot the system.
>
>To turn synchronous transfer back on at the highest possible speed
>without using tagged queueing, change the scsi_options line to:
>
> set scsi_options = 0X178
>
>To turn synchronous transfer back on at the highest possible speed
>allowing tagged queueing (if available in the operating system), change
>the scsi_options line to:
>
> set scsi_options = 0X1f8
>
>It's too bad that I didn't save some of the bug reports that I found
>concerning the Barracuda, but they made for some interesting reading.
>Apparently, more than an average number of people end up having to
>disable Tagged Queuing, but Seagate won't admit that a problem exists.
>Well, anyway, I hope this helps you out in some way.

______________________________________________________________________________

Paul Kanz
System Administrator
Interconnectix, Inc.
10220 SW Nimbus Ave, Building K4
Portland, OR 97223
Email: paul@icx.com
Phone: 503.684.6641
Fax: 503.639.3469
______________________________________________________________________________