🚀 go-pugleaf

I am having some problems with a SCSI harddrive, and I was hoping some
of you might have some ideas.  Or information about the NeXT SCSI
interface.

The situation:
    Drive is an external 320 Meg. originally designed for use with IBM
PC's (through a SCSI card).  Drive can be seen from the NeXT on the SCSI
bus.  Drive can be low-level formated with 'disk' or 'sdformat'. 
However attempts to do a high-level format (newfs) result in errors:

sd1: Incomplete disk transfer; bytes moved = 0x400, resid = 0x400, retry 1

for [1-9] retries.  Obviously something is not kosher.  But the drive is
SCSI-2 with Rev > 17B.  Any ideas?


The Questions:
    After talking with the drive manufacturer extensively, they had the
following questions about NeXT SCSI:

    1) Does the [SCSI interface] system allow disconnect during write?
         (ie, Can it disconnect before going into the data phase?)

    2) What is the burst size that it transfers data at.  Does it have a set
          burst size that it tries to transfer [send] blocks [data] at?

    3) What is the name of the configuration file to change the mode select
          of the drive?

I was a bit confused by #3 -- it seems that SCSI drives are configurable
from the host computer in some manner.  But it seems as though this
would have to be done in ROM, or somewhere early on in the bootstrapping
proceedure.  (/etc/disktab does not seem to be what we/they are after --
they are interested in lower-level information, like buffer parameters,
phasing of the drive, and so forth...)  Does anyone have any ideas?


@begin mild_flame

Yes, I know the correct way to get this information is the call up NeXT,
shell out $100 bucks, and be told the information.  But I can't really
afford to do that right now...  So, I thought I'd try asking here.

One has to wonder just how much business this is costing NeXT.  You know
-- penny wise and dollar dumb!

@end mild_flame


        Anyway, thank you for your time and help.  It is greatly appreciated!

              -David
               da0g+@andrew.cmu.edu