cgb@count0.uucp (cgb) (06/28/91)
What happens when it breaks? I recently had my NeXTstation
go down and I thought I would relate what happened and how it was
fixed.
Friday 7:15pm:
I made a change to my crontab that should have run 5 mins later.
It didn't. For some reason I thought that perhaps the cron daemon
had stopped, so I went through a normal shutdown/power off and
restarted the system. BOOM! fsck started reporting all kinds
of bad inods and asking if I wanted them cleared. I said no.
The system never made it to the workspace so I restarted it again. This time I was dropped into the monitor with an exception 4.
Friday about 7:30pm:
I called NeXT service and got voice mail. at about 7:40 I called again, The operator remembered me and ask me to hold while he found a "real person". At 7:45 I spoke to Paula Lorenz, explained the problem and she said that the system gurus thought that it was a motherboard problem. She seemed very concerned with my problem. Since their shipping had closed at 4:30pm pst she said that she couldn't send the motherboard out until Monday but that it would go "overnight" and both the board and the Motor
ola service techs would be here on Tuesday.
Tuesday 10:30am:
As promised, the board arrived and I received a call from our local Motorola service. They came, replaced the motherboard and guess what? Same Problem. They consulted with NeXT service and decided that even though the exception pointed the the motherboard, that NeXT service would overnight a new hard drive AND another motherboard.
Tuesday LATE:
While I had my critical stuff backed up, I had some little niceties that I had never deemed worthy of backing up, like my news files, and tomorrow my
hard disk was leaving. So I went to visit a friend who also owns a slab
(Thank you Tyler Gingrich) to see if we could boot my system remote.
We couldn't, but since he has direct access to internet we went out and found the "Make a Bootable Floppy shell script" at Oregon State. IMHO everyone that
owns a NeXTstation should have a bootable floppy, in fact, I think that the
floppy that comes with the system should be bootable. Anyway after we booted the system from floppy we were able to mount the hard disk and run fsck.
The problem turned out to be that I had a bad super block on the disk. I let fsck have at it was then able get what I wanted from the hard drive.
Wednesday 10:30am:
All is right with the world. FED X came, the Technicians arrived, life is good. What did it cost? Nothing in money, the 1 year system warranty
includes on site service (DAMN good service IMHO).
To the NeXT Service Dept: THANK YOU. The NeXT will make it as system because it has great hardware and software. NeXT will make it as a company as much on how it treats people after the sale, as on how it sells systems.
To mike carlton: Your bootable floppy script saved me a lot of work. Everyone who owns a slab should have this script.
To Tyler Gingrich : Thanks for staying up late and "cruising" the internet
with me.
Chuck Bennett
--
NeXT Developer {model -> controller -> view} Accept no substitutes.