Re: 2.8 sees hard drive; 3.0 doesn't

[Jeff Ross <jross@openvistas.net>]

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Ben Goren wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 06:46:22PM -0500, Nick Holland wrote:
>
> > Ben Goren wrote:
> >
> > > On one of them, none of the 3.0 install floppies recognize the
> > > hard drive. On  the other, all  is fine. I've tried  all three
> > > images  on  the  CD,  plus the  floppy30.fs  from  the  latest
> > > snapshot and a  ``make release'' of -stable done  on the 28th;
> > > if there's  a different result  among the five disks,  I can't
> > > see it.
> > >
> > > Suggestions most welcome; dmesges below.
> >
> > I love dmesg's, thanks! 8-)
>
> Have you seen any professionals about this?
>
> > [. . .]  The one that is  not working is running  an old ST3290A
> > (that would be a 250M IDE drive),  which is not a DMA drive (no,
> > I don't have this memorized...
> >
> > Interestingly, I don't  think I've ever tried to put  a very old
> > drive on a not-so-old computer,  so I'm not sure how wide-spread
> > this problem would be...
>
> See below; I might be able to  donate the drive to science if it'd
> be worth fixing.
>
> > If  you want  to  prove me  wrong (or  right),  swap the  drives
> > between the machines,  the problem should follow  the drive, not
> > the machine.
>
> I was afraid you'd suggest that--I'm trying to minimize downtime.
>
> I was able to scrounge another  drive, a 2 1/2 Gbyte ST32532A. The
> installer sees it,  so my immediate problem  is solved. Heck, it's
> big enough for an /altroot and then some!
>
> So, I  haven't confirmed that  the old  drive has problems  in the
> other computer, but I have confirmed that a different, newer drive
> has no problem. Good enough diagnostics?
>
> > I'm guessing  if you  were to disable  the pciide  driver (which
> > forces  the system  to use  the older  non-DMA driver),  it will
> > recognize the ST3290A drive.  This can be done by doing this: [.
> > . .]
>
> I think it half-worked. It found a wdc0 but never a wd0.
>
> > Yeah,  disabling DMA  support hurts  performance, but  shouldn't
> > have much [. . . .]
>
> Frankly, if floppies weren't so amazingly unreliable (I've had two
> brand new  ones go bad just  in this experimenting, and  I've only
> needed  two  total (one  for  the  boot  floppy  and one  for  the
> sneakernet)) then  I'd be booting  from a  floppy. Or a CD  if the
> BIOS supported that. Why does OpenBSD have  to work so well on old
> equipment? Lack of cash aside, I have no excuse to upgrade.
>
> Anyway, assuming all goes well with the upgrade, I'll have the old
> drive left over. Would anybody want it  to see if it could be made
> to work? If not, it'll just go in the Frankenbin.
>
> > Nick.
>
> Thanks much,
>
> b&
>
> P.S. In  light of  a  recent post  of yours  (Nick),  will I  have
> trouble with only 16 Mbytes  RAM? They'll be firewalls, of course;
> one a bridge, the other with  IPs but no NAT. Nothing but pf, only
> minimal logging. b&

My Compaq will _run_ GENERIC just fine with 16 megs.  It is just the
installer that hangs.  It is currently doing a make build of -current, and
acting as a firewall on my cable modem setup, natting one Mac.
Throughput to the Mac from the internet is not impeded.

 > > P.P.S. The problem drive  came from a Compaq 486  that I installed
> my  very first  firewall  on,  using a  brand-new  CD  of Red  Hat
> 4.1. Oh, the memories.... b&
>
[dmesgs snipped]
>
> --
> Ben Goren
>  mailto:ben@trumpetpower.com
>  http://www.trumpetpower.com/
>  icbm:33o25'37"N_111o57'32"W
>
> [demime 0.98d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
>

Jeff Ross
Open Vistas Networking, Inc.
http://www.openvistas.net