russ@prism.gatech.EDU (Russell Shackelford) (06/07/89)
have a ST-251, formatted w/ ontrack to be a 9mb & a 33mb works just fine MOST of the time, but occasionally DISAPPEARS. when this happens, i get a hard disk error message. ontrack diag's say to check the controller, cables, jumpers, etc. NONE of these are the problem, as the problem persists with EACH of those examined, swapped, etc. just moved it to a new machine and the problem persists.... so the problem seems pretty clearly to reside in the drive itself... SOMETIMES it seems that fooling with the cables makes a difference, i.e., it magically works.... OTHER TIMES this does no good, but leaving it alone and distracting MYSELF by thinking about something else for an hour or so seems to work, i.e., the damn thing starts working again for NO APPARENT REASON... The thing will work ok for months at a time, and will then flake... and the problem ONLY OCCURS with a boot, i.e., if I just leave the machine ON all the time, everything is hunky dory... but if the power goes out I never know if it's gonna reboot ok or not.... Does this make ANY SENSE to ANYBODY ?? !! ?? !!! -- Russell Shackelford School of Information and Computer Science Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332 russ@prism.gatech.edu (404) 834-4759
tcm@srhqla.UUCP (Tim Meighan) (06/07/89)
In article <767@hydra.gatech.EDU> russ@prism.gatech.EDU (Russell Shackelford) writes: >have a ST-251, formatted w/ ontrack to be a 9mb & a 33mb >works just fine MOST of the time, but occasionally DISAPPEARS. when >this happens, i get a hard disk error message. Russ, this sounds like a thermal problem. Something is getting hot and humid and going south on you. The classic symptom of most thermal failures is that they seem to come and go for no apparant reason. If you're SURE you've absolutely eliminated funky cables, loose connectors, cold solder joints at the connectors, chips not seated in sockets, incorrect use of the drive card, wrong setup, etc, and the problem is still there, then it's probably failing from heat. One way to tell is to start with a cool drive, then heat it up quickly with a blow dryer. If it starts to fail, at least you know the reason. Unfortunately, thermal failures are even harder to fix than they are to verify. I had a system with a similar problem, which I "fixed" by leaving the cover off the computer. As long as it was uncovered, it worked fine. This is not a very good way to take care of such troubles, though. Much as I hate to say it, if your data is really important (and whose isn't), you should get rid of any drive that cannot be made to work properly. It will only make you very, very unhappy to continue using it. Tim Meighan SilentRadio