Bad label on hard drives

[DENIS%EVAX.P-E-T.Mankato.MSUS.EDU at cunyvm.cuny.edu]

I have upgraded my SUN sparc1's (5) to 4.1. About a week or two after the
upgrade, one of the system disks (sd0) seemed to have its label corrupted.
The machine wouldn't boot - the message I got were:

Booting from: sd(0,0,0) vmunux
Can't read disk label
Can't read boot blocks
  Boot load failed

nor could I use format on the disk because format couldn't find sd0 - got:

# format
  searching for disks... sd0: offline

About a week after that the exact same thing happened on another sparc.
(sd0 is a Quantum 105mb drive and each sparc has two of them).

I called sun software support and they didn't think the drive problems
were related to the new os but it seems extremely coincidental that this
same problem should occur so close together.

Has anyone else had similar experiences??  Are the disk dying of natural
causes?? (They are a little over 1 yr old.) Is there any way to recreate a
label for the drives??

Denis Becker
denis at msus1.bitnet