greg@cityzoo.acs.umbc.edu (Greg Sylvain,Lib 007a,3929,6445148) (08/11/90)
Hello all,
I ran into a problem last week that I think I should let you all
know about.
Last week I went to reboot my system and the system never
came back. (gotta hate those 5 minute jobs. haha) The Secondary Loader came
back with the error message "unexpected use of FFFFFFC4". This error message
was received on ALL kernels that I tried to boot from. I used another
system that we had and mounted the disk on it. I rolled the disk down the
hall, made the device files and mounted it with no problem. Then I used 'dd'
to copy the boot block from the good machine's boot disk to the bad disk
and copied over it's (good) kernel.
The machine still failed to boot off the bad disk, meanwhile,
it was very happy to boot off it's original root disk. I have no idea why it
would boot off one disk and not the other, when both disks had the same kernel
and the same 8K boot block, they were both running 7.0 configured into a 300
cluster. The only way I could fix it was to re-install 7.0. To say the least
it was a pain in the ASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Software was NO HELP AT ALL, (well they were the ones
who pointed me at dd ). They tried to say it was a Hardware problem, but
I find this hard to believe because this problem also happened to the 'good'
300 cluster machine that I refered to earlier. That machine was fresh out of
the box, it was a virgin box and a virgin disk, neither of which had been
touched before by us. So this was the second time in ONE WEEK we had to
re-install 7.0.
Could someone please explain to me how something that is as serious as
this would go un-noticed by HP for so long. ( I rebooted my machine
successfully many times since I upgraded to 7.0 before this) This is not ment
to be a total flame, but please,HP, take some offense to part of it. I realize
that some of it may of been my fault, but going as far as making the 2 disks
look identicall as far as the boot blocks and kernels are concerned should
fix any boot problem, I would think. Has anyone else ahd any experiences like
this, if so I'd very much liek to hear how you got out of it ?
greg
P.S it took me 2 days to get my system back up, instead of less
than 5 minutes. I should also say that I used the recovery tape to get the
disk back, but it didn't help either.
Greg Sylvain
Academic Computing Services
Systems Programmer
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