dac@runxtsa.runx.oz.au (Andrew Clayton) (08/12/90)
More on the weird activity of a Hard drive in darkest Canberra. Firstly, to Darren New: [I don't know how to use MAIL yet to other systems - thanx for the message though!] > Sounds like you have a hardware problem. I don't have a > miniscribe, but most SCSI controllers I've seen do some sort of > self test and use the busy light to indicate what failed. It's an ST506 interfaced drive. It was a hardware problem. Emphasis on 'was'. :-) > You should probably look through your manual to see what two > shorts and a long mean. (Or did you pirate that hard drive and > forget to copy the manual? :-) Sore point: I got NO documentation with the drive. I had no idea of #heads, #cylinders, or anything. I had to work on hearsay. The information I got was correct though. When I purchased the drive, it cost me $A1250 (~$US$1000). I would have thought a couple of sheets of paper, explaining a few salient details about the drive, would have been a simple enough gesture on the part of Miniscribe [a now-defunct company!]. Anyway, the problem got _really bad_ on Friday, and the drive went into failure mode, and wouldn't come out of it. This occurred whilst I was backing up the drive [including all the USEnet data I'd downloaded from RUNX in Sydney!]. I called around [finding out that Miniscribe are defunct], and that the 'flashing' of the activity LED was indeed a fault indication. I resignedly opened up my A2500/20, and had a poke around - it's only eight weeks old, and I must have had the cover off in the first three weeks at least a dozen times. The front of the metal chassis was quite dusty, and lots of dust was on the exposed underside electronics of the Miniscribe. I cleared away what I could, and blew out a bit of dust from the circuitry. I reseated all the HD connectors (even though they didn't seem loose), and then tried a power on. The drive came back to life. [implied 'yay team!'] I ran a small script: [Ram:redo] Copy fh3: null: all quiet echo "Got through again" execute ram:redo And that ran fine about a dozen times [on 30megs worth of data/ programs], before I decided that it wasn't going to fail again. Since then (it's now 12.30am, Sunday morning), I've had no reoccurence of the drive failure, and I can only surmise that it was either the dust [caused by the fan sucking in air, causing some short circuit?] or a faulty connector [6 weeks of constant twin HD vibration?]. Of course, my 'theory' that MSH was doing something weird was completely without merit, and I feel foolish for posting such a hypothesis. Hope that was of some use to you bemused net.readers _l _ _ Andrew Clayton. I post . (_](_l(_ Canberra. Australia. . . I am.