Re: Largest disk for Sun IPX

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Martin Etteldorf wrote:

andy thomas <andy@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
What is the largest size disk I can fit into an IPX? I think I remember
reading somewhere it was something like 1 GB but I'm not sure.

The only limit I'm aware of is a rather mechanical one. You can at
least use 73 GB disks, most likely even larger ones.
I'm using a 4.5 GB and a 9 GB disk in an old Sun 3/80 running SunOS
4.1.1_U1 without any problem, and this machine is even older than the
IPX.

Yes, you're right. I always thought there was no real limit with SCSI, unlike other types of hard disk interface, and that only the physical interface connector type, SCSI standard (SCSI 2, SCSI 3, etc) and the physical size were limiting factors. (I have 147 GB disks in a E150).

I've tried fitting a Western Digital WDE 4360 4.3 GB disk and then
installing Solaris 7 but part way through the install it reports that the
disk is unformatted and/or offline. Configuring the format.dat parameters
manually with the settings listed on the WD website using the 'type'
option to the format utility and then attempting to format the disk
results in more warnings about an offline disk followed by 'Reserve
failed' and the format is aborted.

Sounds like a hardware defect on your disk or maybe a bad geometry
to me.

I think it actually is a defective disk as it won't work on other SCSI systems either. I bought it secondhand very cheap on eBay as 'untested' so I'm not complaining.

The 'type' option to the format program allows me to specify disks as
large as SUN 2.9GB so is this the largest disk for this platform?

No. See above.
How did you call "format"? How did you configure the disk?
The "type" menu of format should have an "other" entry at the
very end. Choose that one and type in the correct data.

I used the format program from a shell and yes, I selected the 'other' entry as you describe above and typed in all the parameters listed in the UNIX format.dat support section on the WD support site.

Anyway, I'm about to acquire a working 2.1 GB disk so I'll fit that instead.

cheers,

Andy


.

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