Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!elroy!spl1!wheaton!stefan
From: stefan@wheaton.UUCP (Stefan Brandle )
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec
Subject: Re: Disk Drive/Controller performance.
Message-ID: <920@wheaton.UUCP>
Date: 11 Mar 89 16:29:36 GMT
References: <22995@adelie.Adelie.COM>
Reply-To: stefan@wheaton.UUCP (Stefan Brandle )
Distribution: usa
Organization: Wheaton College, IL
Lines: 46

In article <22995@adelie.Adelie.COM> sean@adelie.Adelie.COM (Sean Conway) writes:
>(2) Disk Drive Combination/Disk Partitioning of Third Party Drives.
>
>    Can you buy a MicroVAX 3600 CPU with only Third Party Drives, particurly,
>    Emulex 9720-1230 Drive and QD34 crontroller.  The reason this doesn't
>    seem possible is that during installation of Ultrix, how does the
>    installation software know the partioning scheme of the Emulex
>    drive so that it can create the "/", "/usr", "/usr/users", swap, dump.
>    and crash space file systems.
I don't know of any nice way of handling this since the installation software
is pretty much hard-coded for DEC hardware (as far as I can tell).  I got
things going by using an existing bootable DEC  drive (RD53 of uVAX II) to get
up and running, then using chpt to set up a non-DEC drive to the partitions
that I wanted (ie. more that 7.5 MB on /, bigger swap, etc.), change the
/etc/disktab so that it now knew about the disk, doing newfs on the new
partitions, and then copy over the / and /usr file structures by dumping
partitions and piping them to restore on the new partitions.  Then you go in
and beat the /sys/conf/MACHINE_NAME file into submission.  One particularly
sticky thing was getting a non-DEC drive to be drive 0.  The RQDX3 didn't care
about somebody else having the higher numbered drives in its address space
(drives 0 to 3), but it threw a fix if it had drive 2, but somebody else had 0
and 1.  I finally (after getting nothing from three separate DEC sources) told
it that it controlled drives 4-7 and that the RD53 was drive 4.  With that in
the configuration file and the appropriate jumpers set (there was an error in
the manual, which didn't make that easier) I finally got everything running.
My boot disk is a Wren III running in the 16ms range as opposed to an RD53
running at whatever it runs (about twice as slow, as I recall).  Loading
programs, swapping, etc is nicer when your b partition (traditional swap) is on
a fast disk.
>    If during the installation, you cannot put "system" file systems on
>    non-supported DEC drives, then it means you must have at least one DEC
>    drive where all the "system" file systems will live.
Just during installation.  Once you are up, you can fiddle around and swap
drives to your heart's content.  One DEC drive would do all your machines.

Disclaimer: I did the above on a MicroVAX II under Ultrix 2.0.  However, should
be basically the same for a 3600.

Let me know if you need more help.  I'm not an expert, but I did get it going.

Stefan Brandle
-- 
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Stefan Brandle                           UUCP: ...!{spl1,obdient}!wheaton!stefan
Wheaton College                          "But I never claimed to be sane!"
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