andrea@genrad.UUCP (Andrea Akerib) (02/04/85)
We have been having problems with our RA81s on our VAX780s , and we have already ordered another one. We had been seeing "hard errors" at a reasonably low rate, but finally we ended up trashing an entire disk. When the RA81 was the root device, we were crashing the system as much as two or three times a day. When we moved the root to another device, the problem was reduced greatly. I had heard something about a bug in the driver, so we contacted Berkeley, they sent us a new driver, but it scribbled all over the disk. Does anyone know about a REALLY fixed driver? DEC diagnostics seems to think that the problem is software, not hardware. Besides, the problem occurs on several machines with RA81s, and none of our machines running VMS have had problems with RA81s. This is really important, please respond to Andrea Akerib (decvax!genrad!andrea)
kel@ea.UUCP (02/11/85)
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You might try MtXinu {ucbvax!mtxinu}. We have been running
our 750 on an ra81 for over a year now, and never had driver
problems.
Good Luck,
Kenroot@trwatf.UUCP (Lord Frith) (06/04/85)
We had what appeared to be driver problems as well. At first our Unix
4.2 / RA81 / RA60 combo seemed to work fine. Then, gradually, the
system began crashing with mysterious hard errors being recorded on the
console. The crashes became more and more frequent... once a week...
once a day... twice a day... until it crashed one day and refused to
boot again (seems every copy of unix on the root fs was removed! That
included vmunix genvmunix vmunix.old and vmunix.pre_chaos).
So was it a software problem? A media flaw on the disk?
Nope... our UDA50 controller had an old rev number. When DEC replaced
it with a "newer" version, the problem went away like magic.
--
UUCP: ...{decvax,ihnp4,allegra}!seismo!trwatf!root - Lord Frith
ARPA: trwatf!root@SEISMO
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