Time to revive an old thread.
I've got a 20MB Corvus hard drive that I've connected to the Lisa on the bottom port of a parallel card in Slot 1.
To Uniplus, this is /dev/c1a with the following attributes:
brw-rw-rw- 1 root root 2, 16 Jan 4 08:41 /dev/c1a
This existed already, but can be recreated using mknod and would result in the same.
I've created an adapter to adapt the IDC34 connector to DB25, and made the following connections:
PROFILE<->CORVUS
D0<->D0
D1<->D1
D2<->D2
D3<->D3
D4<->D4
D5<->D5
D6<->D6
D7<->D7
STROBE<->STROBE
BSY<->READY
RESET<->RESET
RW<->DIRC
So far, so good. Now, when attempting to straight up mount /dev/c1a using mount /dev/c1a /t the Corvus comes to life, and the FAULT lite is solid while the BUSY light blinks. The console reports the following every 3 seconds or so:
read error: /dev/c1a blkno=1
After roughly 30 seconds that, it reports this every 3 seconds:
read error: /dev/c1a blkno=2
After roughly 30 seconds, activity stops and a console prompt returns.
So, the preferred course of action was probably to create a file system on the disk using mkfs1b as describe in the docs:
mkfs1b /dev/c1a 32420
Where 32420 is the size of the root partition (max for a 20MB disk).
mkfs1b /dev/c1a 32420
bytes per logical block = 512
total logical blocks = 32420
total inodes = 8104
gap (physical blocks) = 7
cylinder size (physical blocks) = 400
It's at this point that nothing happens - the console is effectively locked up and I'm unable to stop the process. It will sit here for hours. There is no activity or trace of activity on the drive itself. This behavior is different than what is seen with, say, a ProFile connected to /dev/c2a - the mkfs1b operation takes less than 5-10 seconds. I CAN trigger an NMI by pushing the interrupt switch on the back, so the kernel is still responsive.
I don't have a scope handy, but when I have some extra time might try to put the Saleae on there to see if anything interesting can be found.