bmathews@csvax1.cs.tcd.ie (Brian Mathews, IGSG, F.32, xtn. 1531) (09/09/89)
I wonder if anybody can help ? Our explorer crashed in the
middle of a KEE session, and on re-booting, failed to find the FILE partition.
This is because it is failing to recognise the existence of the user hard disk
(unit 1). Commands such as print-disk-label give "illegal unit number" when 1 is
given as an argument. We've checked all the connections, and they appear solid.
All the systems software is on disk 0, which is being recognised, and all user
files are on disk 1. Booting works fine up until its tries to find the FILE
partition, when it aborts.
It is the only explorer in this country, with the result that there are no
available service engineers, without paying multiple amounts of cash to have
one flown in from England (there's no maintenance contract ...). Temporarily,
there is no systems manager, either.
Are there any safe actions (i.e non-disk-corrupting) which a
non-systems-manager-but-good-programmer type of person (me) can take to see
if we can fix the problem, before having to call in the engineers ?
Is there some entry in a system table somewhere which needs modification ?
If so, how ?
Thanks,
Brian Mathews.
P.S. This is kind of urgent - there's a whole thesis implementation on that
disk, which is due in October. And it's not possible to transfer to another
machine with the back-ups, 'cos there is no other machine ...
E-mail : bmathews@tcdcs.uucp
S-mail : c/o Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland.snicoud@ATC.BOEING.COM (Stephen Nicoud) (09/11/89)
Date: 9 Sep 89 16:42:46 GMT
From: mcsun!ukc!tcdcs!csvax1.cs.tcd.ie!bmathews@uunet.uu.net (Brian Mathews, IGSG, F.32, xtn. 1531)
...
This is because it is failing to recognise the existence of the user hard disk
(unit 1). Commands such as print-disk-label give "illegal unit number" when 1 is
given as an argument. We've checked all the connections, and they appear solid.
Just about every Explorer I've ever worked on or even seen has had a
disk replaced. Welcome to the club. I can't help with troubleshooting
on the disk, but I can offer some advice to recover your files.
The idea, is to create a new FILE partition on your good disk (you
didn't mention the exact number of disks you have, but it sounds like
you've got two disk drives and one them is the broken one (correct?)).
I also assume you have a tape drive. The difficulties that come into
play are whether you have enough room on that one disk for your new FILE
partition.
It depends on how you have backed up your files (backup partition vs.
backup directory/file). If you backed-up your FILE partition, then
you'll need to create a partition of the exact same size. If you
backed-up your files using backup directory/file, then you need only
create a FILE partition "large enough" to hold your files.
It will be a tight squeeze considering your good disk has at least one
load band and probably a PAGE partition or two. You may have to resort
to using a bootable-tape so that you can remove the load band from the
disk to give you room.
Be cautioned, however, that you want to be sure you know the proper
steps to take to creating and using a bootable-tape, creating
disk-partitions and editing the disk-label in general. Read, carefully,
Chapter 6 of the IO reference on "Maintaining a Disk". If you use a
bootable-tape, test it out before removing your load and/or microcode
partitions.
Good Luck!
Steve snicoud@atc.boeing.com