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From: dixon@sagittarius.crd.ge.com (walt dixon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux
Subject: Re: SCSI devices under A/UX
Message-ID: <6007@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 13 Mar 90 13:55:50 GMT
References: <4506@helios.TAMU.EDU> <12315@thorin.cs.unc.edu> <1759@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk> <9023@shlump.nac.dec.com> <235@inpnms.UUCP> <1775@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk>
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Reply-To: dixon@sagittarius.crd.ge.com (walt dixon)
Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY
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In response to a question about what devices the A/UX SCSI driver will
support,  William Roberts write:

>Disk drives are OK, but they will need to be partitioned in a
>way that conforms to the Apple partitioning approach, and then
>some extra A/UX stuff done with the A/UX dp utility. Your best
>bet is to stick with a disk that is advertised as being
>suitable for use with the Macintosh (but then these are pretty
>cheap anyway, compared with Sun peripherals and the like).
>
>Any Mac-compatible disk that doesn't require special things in the
>System Folder should work, and so do some of the ones that do. The
>SCSI handling under A/UX is more or less generic SCSI commands
>and the A/UX system understands big disks just like other UNIX
>systems do.

A word of caution is in order here.  If one is using the drive solely
for A/UX,  the generic SCSI driver works fine,  but one may run into
problems with a MacOS partition.  Before Jasmine came out with support
for A/UX (they do support A/UX now,  don't they?),  I moved A/UX to
a Jasmine DD140 drive (creating a 40MB mac partition and increasing the
size of the root A/UX file system.  Using the generic SCSI driver
A/UX worked flawlessly,  but the MacOS hung during disk writes.  After
some digging,  I traced the probem to SCSI write blind commands.
By converting write blind requests to write,  I eliminated the MacOS
write problem.

Walt Dixon		{arpa:		dixon@crd.ge.com	}
			{us mail:	ge crd			}
			{		po box 8		}
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Walt Dixon dixon@crd.ge.com