[rescue] tape drive with no SCSI

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Wed, 2001-11-07 at 22:38, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 11:54:11PM -0600, Phil Brutsche wrote:
> > On Wed, 2001-11-07 at 23:30, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > 	hdparm -d1 -X66 <device>
> > 
> > where <device> is your hard drive.
> 
> I might try that.  The man page says it's dangerous though.  How 
> dangerous?  It might crash, or it might scramble the disk, or destroy the 
> disk?  Are these posibilities?  I'm looking through the man pages for how 
> to get info on what drive type it thinks it's working with.

You can scramble data, which I've done on numerous occasions.  I have a
list of some settings that have been "safe" on every machine I've tried,
or had people try so far (probably getting close to 100 machines now). 
I'll try to dig them out.

Ah, here they are.
hdparm -m16 -c1 -d1 -a8 /dev/hdX

I can't recall what that does offhand, but it's safe on your machine.

> > > This sort of thing really hits my buttons about linux (and perhaps any 
> > > unixish OS I suppose).
> > 
> > I've had to do similar things to FreeBSD, NetBSD and Windows.  Unless
> > you configure the kernel to use the bus master IDE drivers for your IDE
> > chipset IDE will always be slow.
> 
> Sigh.  I'd consider moving the machine to all scsi, but I haven't been 
> imressed with the performance of my sisters nearly all SCSI (one 
> IDE CDRom) system.  A 430tx mobo, adaptec 2440, or whatever the common 
> bootable PCI controller was from that company.  Better to just wait till I 
> can afford a real machine (Symbolics XL1200, I'm waiting for thee).

If you're running Linux, I'd stay away from SCSI.  Linux SCSI support
isn't near so good as IDE support yet.  It downright sucks in some
cases.
	Greg