uport drive bug?

[James Van Artsdalen]

In article <505 at wa3wbu.UUCP>, john at wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) writes:
>      Is there any common controller being used by the sites having massive
> dual-disk errors?

I was using a Western Digital 1003 with a Seagate 4096 and a Rodime 103E on
an old-style PCs Ltd 12MHz 286 with 2.5meg of RAM.  The problems occurred at
6MHz also, and at various interleaves.  The drive is believed not at fault,
as the reported error did not occur on a manufacturer-marked bad spot, and
both drives passed Novell's COMPSURF on a 150hr test (since uPort didn't
say *which* drive failed, both were so tested).  Multiple controllers were
tried, although all were various revisions of the WD1003, as that's all I had
access to.  The problem was observed with uPort 1.3.6, 1.3.8b3 & 2.2.

> I even tried the cpio experiment. I cpio -p 10MB worth from the second
> disk onto the first disk, simultaneously with News expire, simultaneously
> with the first disk doing a "find . -depth -print" and had no problems.
> I mean, the disks were cranking big-time forever. :-)

On my machine, as soon as the disk buffers had filled and the system started
bouncing between the two drives on almost every access, there would be a bogus
error within a minute.  This test would have showed it.
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen    ...!uunet!utastro!bigtex!james     "Live Free or Die"
Home: 512-346-2444 Work: 328-0282; 110 Wild Basin Rd. Ste #230, Austin TX 78746