[rescue] hard drive problem: probe sees it, format doesn't

[Arthur Wouk]

i am tring to rescue a sparc2 with weitek powerup chip and restore it
to service. the nvram is derad, and that caused one set of problems
which i resolved.

the second problem  is one which i believe i have seen discussed
somewhere, possibly on this list, but i don't knxp how to search
effectively for the threads.

this came with two boat anchors (st1480N drives)small, noisy, and
running very hot. since i want to put  an extra memory card in this
beast, and the breakout box card which allows tip to connect to all
other machines around here, and the weitek chip runs hot too, i wanted
to both increase the size of the internasl drive, reduce the heat, and
the noise. so i got the following drive:

	COMPACPCDORS-32160

which is an ibm dors-32160 drive which has all the characterisitcs
stated above: cool, small, quiet. 

i was able to boot from cdrom and finally install sol7 on the drive,
but there were some strange complaints along the way. including bad
magic number, but booting from cdrom allowed me to label the drive.

a few boots later, something really bad happened:  a Media Data
Exception when trying to boot, and after i am thrown into the 
message that the drive can't be mounted, and am told that i should
give the root password and run fsck manually, i try that.

immediately i get a 6 line message complaining about inability to read
a certain block, retryable, which repeats for 5 or 6 times, and
then everything hangs.

i never can run fsck on that system.

so i took the drive out, put it in a 411 box and hooked it up to
another computer. this time, probe-scsi sees the drive, but format
replies 'can't stat /c0t1d0s0'. i checked the cabling, since scsi
chains are very susceptible to  bad connections, but everything else
on the chain shows both ways.

1) does anyone know the thread in which discussion of this drive in
sun computers showed up? and where it appeared?

2) does anyone have any hints as to how i can reformat this drive - so
far none of the obvious ways seem to work.