martin@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Bill Martin) (01/03/90)
I have a Rainbow+ with the following configuration: 896K memory DOS 2.11 20 Meg Seagate ST-225 hard drive (2-1/2 years old) Clikclok Lately, it has has developed a perplexing problem. Perhaps one of you might know what's going on. Four months ago, the machine would not boot up from the hard disk, after many months of reliable service. The hard drive made a long series of "head seek" sounds before the terminal displayed a could-not-load-operating-system sort of message. The Winchester diagostics said that either the controller card or the drive itself was bad (failing in subtest 2 on the head seek test). Powering the system on and off didn't seem to correct the problem. I then ran full system diagnostics (main memory, screen, floppies, etc.) with no errors reported. Strangely, the system would then boot off of the hard disk with no problems after I ran the diagnostics. This erratic behavior happened again a couple of days ago. This time I was running WordPerfect 4.2, and the drive failed while saving a wp workfile. The Winchester diagnostics pointed to the same problem as before. I called Suitable Solutions to price out a new controller board. The representative I spoke with said that the cards usually only fail within the first month of service, and that my problem was probably in either the hard drive cable connections or the hard drive itself. I reconnected the hard drive cables and the system would still not boot up. Whle I considered my next move, I ran system diagnostics, but this time only the individual memory and system interaction tests. Again, no errors reported. Incredibly, my Rainbow would then boot off of the hard drive. Does anyone know what might be going on here ? Thanks in advance, Bill Martin Cornell University
bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) (01/04/90)
In article <35667@cornell.UUCP>, martin@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Bill Martin) writes: > The hard drive made a long series of "head seek" sounds before > the terminal displayed a could-not-load-operating-system sort of message. > The Winchester diagostics said that either the controller card > or the drive itself was bad (failing in subtest 2 on the head seek > test). Powering the system on and off didn't seem to correct > the problem. I then ran full system diagnostics (main memory, screen, > floppies, etc.) with no errors reported. Strangely, the system > would then boot off of the hard disk with no problems after I ran > the diagnostics. I would tend to agree with the people at Suitable Solutions. This is probably either a drive problem or a cable problem. Controllers rarely go bad (though that's not impossible either...). We have had lots of hard drive problems with our Rainbow ... lots of ST225's gone bad, plus a bad hard drive cable at one point. All of these can have similar symptoms (we verified that the ST225's had gone bad by trying them out on a PC, so we know that *both* our drives *and* our cable have gone bad independently on different occasions). I'd try replacing the cable to the hard drive, if you can find a replacement. Around here DEC will replace it for a suitably outrageous price (maybe around $100 as I recall...). Might be worth it as insurance. You might also try running the drive on a PC, if you can stand backing it up and reformatting it; you might find that the PC has problems with it too. Our experience with Seagate 225's is VERY bad. For a while our yearly mortality rate for several machines was running at nearly 200% -- having to replace each 225 in each machine about every 6 months. At the moment we are running the Rainbow with 251's without any problems (over a year now), although I think I will probably never really trust a Seagate drive again. Bruce C. Wright