smb3u@mendel.acc.Virginia.EDU (Steven M. Boker) (12/30/90)
A tale of woe from a sadder but wiser 2.0 user. I was initializing some Optical disks yesterday. Insert the previously used OD in the drive and then take the _disk_ menu item from the workspace menu. Then click on _initialize_ submenu item and click OK. Right? Yes, unless you are logged in as root. I had initialized several OD's in a row and was not paying close attention. I now know that you mustn't let your mind wander. I was logged in as root and doing other administrivial tasks while the disks were erased. I now know that the _disk_initialize_ menu item will initialize the current target. This is a very bad idea if the current target is your boot SCSI drive. I realized I had been a very bad boy when the workspace went away and the drive went into swizzle stick land. I managed to powerdown via the keyboard and booted to OD. I mounted what was left of the SCSI partition and recovered the few essentials that weren't on my most recent backup. I then tried to reboot the 2.0 OD and found out that my 2.0 OD had unrecoverable ECC errors. Hoo boy. Out of the frying pan... I managed to build a new 2.0 OD from a friends machine last night and then this morning I rebuilt the SCSI. The SCSI panic>ed when I rebooted to the hard drive and so I said, "self, let's rebood to the OD". But now the Optical Drive won't accept a disk. I know I'm in some twilight landing zone on cylinder -1 someplace. That must be it. I rebooted to the SCSI and now it will boot. But I still can't insert an optical. Does anyone know why an optical drive would not accept a disk? Somewhat Boggled aka Steve Boker.