blee@plains.NoDak.edu (blee) (09/04/90)
Thanks for the great help/ideas so far!
First thing I did with the 16 (in a 12's box) was to run 1.03.xx Xenix,
it seemed to work ok for a about 5 hours with an occasional hard drive
error. Then I found fsck in the manual, which I repeated ran (with several
more hd errors) until it locked up and would no longer boot... so much for
1.3. then I installed 3.01.[3 or 5 ?] which worked ok, except ocassional
hd error until again it locked up and would no longer boot.
I kept a list of errors so next time I could map them out of the picture,
but the list got too be about 20 (that I caught) and never seemed to
repeat, so I am hoping it is a simple problem with rf or bad cable,
I might add two things:
1 I shortened the SCSI cable about 4 inches because it looked damaged
from poor routing through the case.
2 The hard drive was shipped several times by "...of corse it's a hard
drive, it's made of metal"
Any ideas of what is causing this?, yes it is the 15 meg drive, if it
is the drive can I swap in any old drive, is the cable handling 'standard'
SCSI, is the small bord in the drive case a SCSI<>MFM converter?
And lastly, would it be a good Idea to swap all the memory and drive cards
into the 16's chasis? I believe the CPU/memory cards take up 5 slots
(one card with big chips on and 4 with 4164 chips on; all ribbon'd together)
Thanks again for your help!
Blaine Lee
blee @ plains.nodak.edunanook@rwing.UUCP (Robert Dinse) (09/05/90)
In article <5760@plains.NoDak.edu>, blee@plains.NoDak.edu (blee) writes: > > > Thanks for the great help/ideas so far! > > First thing I did with the 16 (in a 12's box) was to run 1.03.xx Xenix, > it seemed to work ok for a about 5 hours with an occasional hard drive > error. Then I found fsck in the manual, which I repeated ran (with several > more hd errors) until it locked up and would no longer boot... so much for > 1.3. then I installed 3.01.[3 or 5 ?] which worked ok, except ocassional > hd error until again it locked up and would no longer boot. I fought what I thought were hard drive problems on my 6000 when I first got it. Turned out to be the main supply voltage was low, but it was one with the internal hard drive controller. Sounds like you have the external. I am guessing that the "SCSI" cable you are referring to is the 50 pin cable from the host interface card to the "primary" drive (the one with the controller in it), if so I don't think shortening it would cause problems. The cables I use are more or less random lenth that I threw together and I haven't had problems with them.
hankd@dynamo.ecn.purdue.edu (Hank Dietz) (09/05/90)
In article <142@rwing.UUCP> nanook@rwing.UUCP (Robert Dinse) writes: > I fought what I thought were hard drive problems on my 6000 when I >first got it. Turned out to be the main supply voltage was low, but it was >one with the internal hard drive controller. Sounds like you have the >external. Oh yes... before I got my 6000, I had a 16B which kept having disk errors no matter what one did. RS tried to repair it about 5 or 6 times over a period of about a year before they gave me one of the first 6000s off the line to replace it.... Anyway, the story apparently is that the model 16 power supply was marginal for a fully populated 68K system, so the more you had in it, the flakier it would get. Usually, it would show up as disk errors (one of the few errors religiously reported by xenix), but also as memory errors on occassion. My understanding is that one of the (few) changes in later machines was a minor upgrade of the power supply.... Anyway, pulling as much out of your system as you possibly can will probably improve things if the power supply is at fault, so I'd give that a try and see if you keep getting random disk errors. BTW, the original posting mentioned something about more than 20 bad spots; well, I still think it sucks, but way back there were a fair number of disks that had more than 20 bad spots when brand new. So, don't let the number scare you... only worry if the set of bad spots keeps changing over time. (Just be thankful that xenix lets you run with a disk with bad spots -- some early unix versions didn't have a bad block table per se.) Also, some of the older hard drives used to be quite temperature sensitive -- let it sit and warm-up for about 30min before you format the disk (or write to the disk in any way) and you might find things work much better.... Come to think of it, I'd try this before even thinking about pulling the system apart.... -hankd@ecn.purdue.edu