jtkohl@MIT.EDU (John T Kohl) (11/21/90)
This is a note from an MIT astronomy grad student on some Sony magneto-optical disk problems. Please contact him directly if you have any questions; I'm not at all familiar with these devices. forwarded message below --------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Nov 90 15:00:00 -0500 From: Joe Harrington <jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> To: Michel.Fingerhut@ircam.fr, jtkohl@MIT.EDU In-Reply-To: Joe Harrington's message of Mon, 19 Nov 90 16:41:45 -0500 <9011192141.AA07869@SOL.MIT.EDU> Subject: sony magneto-opticals Cc: jh@MIT.EDU, rfrench%kepler.wellesley.edu@relay.cs.net, ccount@JADE.MIT.EDU Reply-To: jh@MIT.EDU This is for general distribution. Could someone please post it to whatever newsgroup Michel's question came from? Bill Dallas, an engineer working with DEC's CSS group, has tracked down a bug in the scsi.c file on risc Ultrix. This bug caused a system crash when reading Sony SMO-D500 Magneto-Optical disks with bad disk blocks. A patch to risc Ultrix 4.1 will be available through regular software service channels in a week or two; I do not know if they will do a retrofit to risc Ultrix 4.0. I have found that disks which formerly crashed the machine no longer do so, though they may give I/O errors when the bad blocks are encountered. Bill Dallas will soon have a manual for the drive that will let him put in the full support for this disk as a "real" supported third-party device (like the Exabyte, for example), including locking the drive when a disk is mounted (to keep people from ejecting mounted disks), bad block forwarding, and eliminating the insidious necessity to open the device read-only before any other disk operation can be perormed. A time scale for this larger project is not yet established. People who want to try to do it themselves can get a manual from: Trimarchi, Inc. P.O. BOX 560 2139 High Tech Road State College, PA 16803 (800) 638-8639 I'm interested in any results or any news on this drive; please send personal email since I am not currently reading netnews. --jh-- end forwarded message ------------------ -- John Kohl <jtkohl@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> or <jtkohl@MIT.EDU> Digital Equipment Corporation/Project Athena (The above opinions are MINE. Don't put my words in somebody else's mouth!)