NAME

rk − RK6-11/RK06 and RK07 moving head disk

SYNOPSIS

RK0 at address 0x3fff20/17777440

DESCRIPTION

Files with minor device numbers 0 through 7 refer to various portions of drive 0; minor devices 8 through 15 refer to drive 1, etc.  The standard device names begin with ‘rk’ followed by the drive number and then a letter a-h for partitions 0-7 respectively.  The character ? stands here for a drive number in the range 0-7. 

The block files access the disk via the system’s normal buffering mechanism and may be read and written without regard to physical disk records.  There is also a ‘raw’ interface which provides for direct transmission between the disk and the user’s read or write buffer.  A single read or write call results in exactly one I/O operation and therefore raw I/O is considerably more efficient when many words are transmitted.  The names of the raw files conventionally begin with an extra ‘r.’

In raw I/O counts should be a multiple of 512 bytes (a disk sector).  Likewise seek calls should specify a multiple of 512 bytes. 

DISK SUPPORT

The origin and size (in sectors) of the pseudo-disks on each drive are as follows:

RK07 partitions:
diskstartlengthcyl
rk?a0158840-240
rk?b1590610032241-392
rk?c0537900-814
rk?g2600427786393-813

RK06 partitions
diskstartlengthcyl
rk?a0158840-240
rk?b1590611154241-409
rk?c0271260-410

On a dual RK-07 system partition rk?a is used for the root for one drive and partition rk?g for the /usr filesystem.  If large jobs are to be run using rk?b on both drives as swap area provides a 10Mbyte paging area.  Otherwise partition rk?c on the other drive is used as a single large filesystem. 

FILES

/dev/rk[0-7][a-h]block files
/dev/rrk[0-7][a-h]raw files

SEE ALSO

hp(4), uda(4), up(4)

DIAGNOSTICS

rk%d%c: hard error sn%d cs2=%b ds=%b er=%b.  An unrecoverable error occurred during transfer of the specified sector of the specified disk partition.  The contents of the cs2, ds and er registers are printed in octal and symbolically with bits decoded.  The error was either unrecoverable, or a large number of retry attempts (including offset positioning and drive recalibration) could not recover the error. 

rk%d: write locked.  The write protect switch was set on the drive when a write was attempted.  The write operation is not recoverable. 

rk%d: not ready.  The drive was spun down or off line when it was accessed.  The i/o operation is not recoverable. 

rk%d: not ready (came back!).  The drive was not ready, but after printing the message about being not ready (which takes a fraction of a second) was ready.  The operation is recovered if no further errors occur. 

rk%d%c: soft ecc sn%d.  A recoverable ECC error occurred on the specified sector in the specified disk partition.  This happens normally a few times a week.  If it happens more frequently than this the sectors where the errors are occurring should be checked to see if certain cylinders on the pack, spots on the carriage of the drive or heads are indicated. 

rk%d: lost interrupt.  A timer watching the controller detected no interrupt for an extended period while an operation was outstanding.  This indicates a hardware or software failure.  There is currently a hardware/software problem with spinning down drives while they are being accessed which causes this error to occur.  The error causes a retry of the pending operations.  If the controller continues to lose interrupts, this error will recur a few seconds later. 

BUGS

In raw I/O read and write(2) truncate file offsets to 512-byte block boundaries, and write scribbles on the tail of incomplete blocks.  Thus, in programs that are likely to access raw devices, read, write and lseek(2) should always deal in 512-byte multiples.

A program to analyze the logged error information (even in its present reduced form) is needed. 

4th Berkeley Distribution  —  1 August 1985