[comp.sys.apollo] DN10000 salvol + disk problems

achille@cernvax.UUCP (achille petrilli) (10/04/89)

Hi, we are having a few problems (well, more than a few :-) with some third
party disks we've installed on our DN10000s.
The disks are just Maxtor's 700MB, the same shipped by Apollo, ESDI i/f.
Here are the problems:

	1) on one system we get constantly errors on head 0x0E, sector 0x0C, any
cylinder. We swapped out the disk and introduced a new one, and it did exactly
the same.
	2) after introducing a bad spot, it happens quite often that salvol crashes
during the 2nd pass with the following message:
Internal Error: n_free (12F88) is < 0 in mark_blk in use, looks bad! (zone = 36 zone.n_free = FFFFFFFF)

Does anybody know if problem 1) could be due to cables/controllers problems ?
I don't know enough of ESDI to understand what's going on.
Problem 2 seems pretty bad, if salvol gives up, who's going to fix your disk ?
Any idea about it ?

There is another thing that really makes me wonder: Maxtor disks shipped by Apollo
are some 659MB, 3rd party Maxtor disks come out after an invol to be 683MB.
What's going on here ?

Thanks a lot,
	Achille Petrilli
	Cray & PWS operations