xwu@uscacsc.UUCP (Xinhua Wu) (07/16/87)
What happened was: by accident, I connected power when the on/off switch (at the back of the machine) was at "on" position. After that I can't reboot the machine. It seems that the hard disk was crashed. When I used the diagnostic floppy to reboot, I got the following message: #HDERR ST:1 EF:4 CL:FF00 ... MCRREG:8F00 panic: iinit I used the hardware reset, no luck. I used the floppy boot disk, no luck either. The hard disk couldn't be found by the process. When there's no floppy present, what I saw was green dots appearing on the screen. One dot for each second, no ending. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Xinhua Wu xwu@cse.usc.edu 213-743-3753
brian@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU (Brian Kantor) (07/17/87)
We had a Unix-PC here that exhibited somewhat similar problems; it seemed as though the hard drive had crashed and burned. It had been turned off for the first time in a long time, and then when it was turned back on, the hard drive was dead. Turned out that what had happened was that the rotation brake pad on the hard drive had gotten gooey from heat, and when the drive was turned off, the brake pad had done its job of stopping rotation all right, but had then cemented itself to the brake surface when things cooled down. All I had to do was pry it loose. The drive worked ok after that, and everything seems to still be running ok. The brake is a small composite material pad at the end of a solenoid shaft on the bottom of the drive. When power is on, the solenoid holds the brake pad away from the shiny wheel on the shaft. When power is removed from the drive, the solenoid releases the shaft, and a spring pushes the pad against the wheel. It's all outside the sealed compartment and real easy to get at, once you remove the drive from the system. It might be worth checking to see if this has happened in your case. Brian Kantor UCSD Office of Academic Computing Academic Network Operations Group UCSD B-028, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA