Sun Ultra 5 IDE-SATA bridge + SSD - Labelling the drive

[JonB]

Hi

I have a Sun Ultra 5 sitting on my desk (now a 10 with a full gig of RAM). I'm having a little difficulty with hard drives. I know it's a 40 bit wide IDE bus that might only go to 137GB. Since I have no IDE drives that work quietly (the whine of old hard disks annoys me!) I have scored an IDE-SATA bridge card from eBay and connected it to the IDE port. On the other end is a SATA drive.

I have tried a 160GB drive and got the corrupted label / bad magic number error. I believe this is down to it not being able to recognise the drive properly and it seems to be a problem with all big drives. But, I also scored a cheap 60GB SSD and I get the same problem. I did get an install on the 160GB drive but only with 7.5GB used. Not great, so I am now trying the SSD.

All attempts to label the thing in single user mode have failed. The interface times out and gets reset. I have written some partition info to it, though, but unfortunately the installer isn't interested in it. Just times out trying to partition, then aborts.

I have done an awful lot of googling on this one and come up with little. How can I setup the Solaris disk label properly on this SSD?

Cheers
JonB

 

[haightc]

You can use non Sun drives without issue, you'll just need to format the drive first.
You'll need to launch the installer and quit to the command prompt. then format the drive, Solaris 2.5 and higher will usually be able to detect the drive and create a label accordingly.

 

[Unknown_K]

I went with an bootable UWSCSI card in my Ultra 5. The built in IDE bus just wasn't that speedy (wasn't worried about size limit) and 128GB 10k SCSI drives were cheap at the time.

 

[JonB]

You can use non Sun drives without issue, you'll just need to format the drive first.
You'll need to launch the installer and quit to the command prompt. then format the drive, Solaris 2.5 and higher will usually be able to detect the drive and create a label accordingly.

Sorry, but that's not what's happening here. Every format fails. It doesn't seem to recognise the drive. I have booted into single user mode to do this as you suggested but it fails every time. I need to write the actual errors down, but as I said in my OP it's a timeout then reset on the IDE drive/interface.

 

[haightc]

I know I had issues with some DOMs and block translation with my 486 a while back.
I don't really use my Ultra 5 much, but last night I tried a DOM that just wouldn't report back consistent CHS values.
While my 5 at OBP would recognize the drive when it came to format the drive it failed.
Back when I was trying to install a DOM in my 486 my research found that you need a have flash drive that has legacy blocks mode as many only support logic addressing only.
As I understand you can enable this on some samsung drives and is usually enabled on industrial flash drives.
In regards to the DOMs all my hyperion drives worked but almost non of the kingspec brands did. No lose of the DOMs that didn't work as most were old discards from work.

 

[glitch]

Indeed, not all DOMs are created equal. In replacing many IDE drives in industrial equipment, I've found M-Systems DOMs and SSDs to be more compatible, especially the smaller ones, with old hardware.

I haven't done enough testing with IDE->SATA bridges to offer a real opinion, but for what it's worth, the few I've used have been 44-pin IDE to mSATA SSD module adapters, and have worked fine in not-exactly-vintage (P4 era) laptops.

As mentioned, SCSI may be the easiest way to go for you. Finding cheap 147 GB SCSI drives is easy nowadays (I think I paid $6 apiece last time I bought a small lot of them, guaranteed working for 30 days), but I don't know that you will be able to find *quiet* ones.