NeXT and BlueSCSI question

[ScutBoy]

I'm trying to build an image for NeXT black hardware on BlueSCSI. Latest firmware.

I've used both the NeXT tool to build disks as well as the image @Drake called out from Winworld that is said to work on BlueSCSI for NeXT.

The image is seen by the NeXT as a drive, but in both cases its seen as a read-only device like a CD-ROM. I've poked around a bit, any ideas on what I might be missing.

The original drive is still in the system, but I boot with

bsd(1,0,0)sdmach rootdev=sd1

and while the boot starts, it fails out early since it can't write anything to the disk.

 

[ScutBoy]

OK - so during this I had the original spinning disk in the machine (SCSI ID 1) while the BlueSCSI had a higher address (tried both 6 and 2).

The BlueSCSI was in an external enclosure. Once I disconnected the internal drive so the BlueSCSI was the only thing on the bus, then it came up read/write and booted as expected.

So, some kind of SCSI voodoo or who knows? Anyway, it now works as I expected and I don't need to listen to that screaming Seagate anymore!

 

[wottle]

Good to know if my old SCSI2SD ever dies. I bought it and struggled with it long before BlueSCSI was a thing, but will certainly be replacing it with a BlueSCSI if that time comes.

 

[Drake]

OK - so during this I had the original spinning disk in the machine (SCSI ID 1) while the BlueSCSI had a higher address (tried both 6 and 2).

The BlueSCSI was in an external enclosure. Once I disconnected the internal drive so the BlueSCSI was the only thing on the bus, then it came up read/write and booted as expected.

So, some kind of SCSI voodoo or who knows? Anyway, it now works as I expected and I don't need to listen to that screaming Seagate anymore!

Sorry I didn't hop into thread until now. Glad the bluescsi is sorted. In my case when first troubleshooting my Next cube the original HDD seemingly crapped out immediately after building an image onto the bluescsi. That being said I was running both at the same time (the bluescsi was blank).

If you or anyone has a method of updating the Next image with more software and games please let me know/share. I haven't the chance to drag everything out again since repairing my slab.

 

[mmu_man]

I remember researching the partitioning scheme and filesystem for the NeXT when trying looking at the Haiku port… The NetBSD sources are quite interesting in this regard. Oh, I extracted the info from the NeXTstep headers it seems. At one point I wanted to add support for those in Linux tools like parted and testdisk, you may want to have a try.

 

[mmu_man]

You may also check http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/

 

[michaelengel]

I remember researching the partitioning scheme and filesystem for the NeXT when trying looking at the Haiku port… The NetBSD sources are quite interesting in this regard. Oh, I extracted the info from the NeXTstep headers it seems. At one point I wanted to add support for those in Linux tools like parted and testdisk, you may want to have a try.

Oh, a Haiku port to black hardware? That would be nice to have .

The NeXT Plan 9 port (kernel source in sys/src/9/next/ in the second edition sources) as well as the previous emulator sources are also helpful for bare-metal programming.

I started to play around with NeXT bare metal programming and wrote a little demo – so far only tested in previous. If you're interested, feel free to take a look at my github repo.

 

[JdM74]

Greetings. If you're a member of nextcomputers.org, check out the post in the NeXT Black Hardware section, "BlueSCSI Settings". This will give some helpful setup tips when getting started.