levinel@uunet.uu.net (Lewis Levine) (12/16/88)
This is a response to my own posting to sun-spots a few weeks ago concerning disk controller problems. Luckily, the problem looks like a local one only and that other sites with 450 controllers running 4.0 should not have a problem. I guess I shouldn't have jumped the gun and cried wolf so quickly, but all things seemed to point to the 450/OS4.0 combination (our two other servers running with 451 controllers all came up fine) and an appeal to sun- spots, I hoped, would reveal others having similar troubles. Thanx for all of the responses I received over e-mail, though. It's nice to know there is a responsive community of users out there! Most users will probably not have a problem with their 450 controllers with OS4.0. What happened here (we just got it resolved after 2 1/2 weeks and 4 controllers and 1 disk!) was that the disk that messed up turned out not to be set for slip sectoring. It seems that whoever installed it failed to run format on it! When 4.0 was brought up and the disk format run, no defects list was found and a message about not being configured for slip sectoring also came up. After a fighting with format and a few controllers, sun finally brought in a new disk. Since the new disk was formatted properly, it worked fine. We then went back and figured out what had happened. Once we figured out what had happened, we weren't surprised about the problems we had. Unfortunately it took 2 1/2 weeks to get this particular system back up. Mixed into that time was also the discovery that certain backup tapes had been accidently written over, etc. All in all, I'd say no one else should have the same problem with going to 4.0, we were just a victim of some strange circumstances. (who would think a disk running for over 2 years had never been properly formatted?!?!).