sean@aquinas.UUCP (Sean McCollister) (09/10/88)
Would someone please mail me a description of the so-called "two- hard-drive bug" I've seen mentioned here in the past? I never paid atten- tion before, since I didn't have two hard disks. Now that I DO have two drives, and a migraine headache to go along with them, I'd like to hear from those of you who have struggled to make a dual-disk configuration work with Microport (System V/AT 2.3.0, with and without Merge 286). In a nutshell, my problem is that the first drive (whatever the brand or model, I've tried several) literally seems to disintegrate over a period of several weeks. Bad tracks seem to materialize out of thin air. When I run fdisk to scan for bad tracks, it never picks up anything but those listed on the error-map shipped with the disk. Since I installed the second disk, I have replaced the first drive 5 times, and the controller and cables twice. Through all this, the second disk has worked flawlessly. BOTH drives work flawlessly if I remove UNIX (tm of AT&T) and format them with DOS. None of this happens when only one drive is present. Thanks in advance for any assistance. If anyone else is interested in what I find out, let me know and I'll summarize. -Sean sean@aquinas.UUCP ...killer!aquinas!sean
rsj@wa4mei.UUCP (Randy Jarrett WA4MEI) (09/15/88)
In article <162@aquinas.UUCP> sean@aquinas.UUCP (Sean McCollister) writes: > > Would someone please mail me a description of the so-called "two- >hard-drive bug" I've seen mentioned here in the past? I never paid atten- >tion before, since I didn't have two hard disks. Now that I DO have two >drives, and a migraine headache to go along with them, I'd like to hear >from those of you who have struggled to make a dual-disk configuration work >with Microport (System V/AT 2.3.0, with and without Merge 286). > > In a nutshell, my problem is that the first drive (whatever the >brand or model, I've tried several) literally seems to disintegrate over >a period of several weeks. Bad tracks seem to materialize out of thin >air. When I run fdisk to scan for bad tracks, it never picks up anything >but those listed on the error-map shipped with the disk. Since I installed >the second disk, I have replaced the first drive 5 times, and the controller >and cables twice. Through all this, the second disk has worked flawlessly. >BOTH drives work flawlessly if I remove UNIX (tm of AT&T) and format them >with DOS. None of this happens when only one drive is present. > I have been having the same problems as you have but on the oposite drives. My drive 0 ( CDC Wren ) has not had any problems since day one but when I added the second drive (first one was a Micropolis 1304 ) I had the bad sectors start popping up constantly. I figured that maybe the drive was starting to wear out so I swapped it with another CDC Wren (85Mb) so that I had two identical drives. I keep getting the problems with the second drive so I did a backup and swapped the drives. The problem stayed on the second drive. I have since taken off the second CDC and have a Seagate 4096 on there now. All the drives have been given an extensive going over with Novells Compsurf program several times looking for any problem sectors without any luck. I have run the drives on a Xenix system and they did not have problem one. I then installed Xenix on my system and ran all kind of tests for about a week and not a problem one out of the drives. As it is now I have to run fsck everyday and usually two or three times to get everything straightened up. Occasionally I have to just dump the drive and re-install it (mkfs). I have tried the Microport bbs and not found any replacement drivers there for the 286 version only the 386. I have found passing comments on the system about the problem but no solutions. I have sent several pieces of email to both Sully and Plocher and have not received any replys. As it stands now I am hoping that when the ver 2.4 release comes out that the problems will be corrected ( and maybe a better asy driver). -- Randy Jarrett WA4MEI UUCP ...!gatech!wa4mei!rsj | US SNAIL: P.O. Box 941217 PHONE +1 404 493 9017 | Atlanta, GA 30341-0217