[rescue] Help with SunFire V240 Server

[Cory Smelosky]

On 04/07/2013 11:34 AM, Carl R. Friend wrote:
>
>     On Sun, 7 Apr 2013, Sandwich Maker wrote:
>
>> the general consensus has always been, if the sun takes an sca hd
>> it'll take -any- sca hd.  my experience isn't vast [half vast?], but
>> i've never been disappointed.  my worst problem was finding an
>> acceptable geometry for format.
>
>     This has been my experience as well; modern kit will take pretty
> much whatver drive you throw at it.  Even "format" has loosened up
> quite a bit since the demise of C/H/S addressing in favour of LBA
> addressing and tends to do a good job at identifying disks based
> on an inquiry.

Thankfully, manually entering bad block maps has died out too. ;)

>
>     The only place I've run into problems has been in very old gear
> (late '80s and early '90s) that use signed 32-bit arithmetic in
> dealing with block numbers.  Some of those will get confused if you
> throw something huge at them.  Too, in some cases, modern disks are
> bigger than the address can allow for and those can do strange things
> if you wrap the address (VAXen and boot-disks >1G seem to come to
> mind).  Anything newer than about 2003 really ought to be handle most
> anything that'll come down the 'pike in the next several years with
> the possible exception of some under-engineered (or intentionally
> crippled) IDE kit.

I've never quite understood intentionally crippling IDE gear...wouldn't 
you need to spend time and money figuring out HOW to cripple it? ;)

>
>     On signed arithmetic for logical-block addressing -- WHY?  The
> cynic in me leans towards laziness or lack of attention to detail.
> Surely a negative block would lead to either a seek-to-spindle event
> or an unload (depending on where cylinder 0 is).  Why not use the
> whole width of the word to express an absolute offset and be done
> with?  You get twice as many blocks by not wasting the sign bit.

Some people just don't future proof.

>
>     Cheers!
>
> +------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
> | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
> | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
> | mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
> | http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
> +------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue


-- 
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments