Summary: Hard disk errors on a 3b1

[Brant Cheikes]

In article <388 at ntvax.UUCP> canoaf at ntvax.UUCP (Augustine Cano) posts a
summary of two (!) responses he received to his query about HD errors.

>[...] Brant Cheikes [...] sent a long and detailed
>account of exactly the same problem I'm having.  On his advice, I called
>Ben Wollberg (415)678-1353 (8a-5p PST), who fixed his machine.

The bad news is that he didn't fix my machine.  The problem remains,
though so far the machine has stopped crashing.  But the HDERRs are
still being generated at a pretty good clip.

>Apparently the
>test they run to find and map the bad sectors takes 7 hours. [...]

Despite running this program on my disk, the errors came back
immediately.  I'm increasingly dubious that the problem is bad
sectors.  It looks to me like transient read or write errors, and thus
some electronic problem in the drive (though it seems odd that we're
having identical difficulties).  In any event, I will know more as
soon as I swap my (repaired) 40 Mb (Hitachi) drive back in.

OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS I'D KILL FOR ANSWERS TO:

1. What are the meanings of the following fields in the HDERR message:
   ST, EF, SC, DCRREG, MCRREG.

2. Does anyone know the specs for the WD1010 controller chip?  In
   particular, I have been told by a tech at Seagate that the ST-4096
   will recal if step pulses are spaced more than 7ns apart.  Does the
   controller chip meet this requirement?

3. Is there anyone who has a ST-4096 in their UNIXpc and is having no
   difficulty?
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania, Department of Computer and Information Science
brant at manta.pha.pa.us, brant at linc.cis.upenn.edu, bpa!manta!brant