Stephen, has cfdisk complained after the first time you set up the drive (the first time would have been ok since there was not a DOS/PC sort of partition table on the drive)?
I am 'just clutching at straws here' but in the past there have been some drives that 'lie' to the SCSI bus about their capability during the scsi inquire. Some of these things typically 'hang' the scsi bus (requiring a time out/reset) but others could be 'partially implemented' or at least implemented in such a manner that the driver/interface can not handle. I would suggest disabling 'disconnect/reconnect' or 'Synchronous SCSI' and see if that helps. Also, another problem that I have experienced on other machines is that there were some disagreements as to exactly what the standard meant in determining the size of the scsi inquire response message and depending up just exactly how both the drive and the scsi driver software handled this matter it was possible for the driver to mix some drive specifications in a multi-drive situation (please recognize that this is a problem that can involve the scsi interface ROM as well as say the Linux drivers). In any event, the way to 'get around' a problem caused by this particular problem is to change the scis ID order of the drives. Doing this is, of course, a horrible 'pain' under Linux. I would suggest that if you want to try to see if your problem with this drive is related to this ID order sensitive problem, that you install just this one drive from the Sparc (unplug your other drives--don't forget termination) and install debian on that drive to test its' performance. -- best, -bill [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] from a 1996 Micro$loth ad campaign: "The less you know about computers the more you want Micro$oft!" See! They do get some things right! -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .