dab@cbnewsm.att.com (david.a.berk) (06/05/90)
I am contemplating purchasing a Miniscribe 340 MB ESDI drive model M9830E. Anyone have any experiences with this drive? Dave Berk ..!att!emdbl1!dab (201) 564-3294
art@pegasus.com (Art Neilson) (06/06/90)
In article <1990Jun5.162206.17283@cbnewsm.att.com> dab@cbnewsm.att.com (david.a.berk) writes: >I am contemplating purchasing a Miniscribe 340 MB ESDI drive >model M9830E. Anyone have any experiences with this drive? > > > Dave Berk > ..!att!emdbl1!dab > (201) 564-3294 Mine just crapped out on me this past weekend, it squealed as if in mortal pain and I had to power off the system to stop the squealing. I had the 9380E set up as the second drive in the system, and had been doing a find on the drive when the squealing occurred. After powering the system back up, fsck of course tried cleaning the filesystems on the 9380E after dutifully cleaning those on my primary drive, a brand new ST4393E a.k.a CDC WREN V. As soon as fsck started phase 1 on /dev/dsk/1s1, the awful squealing began again. My only recourse was to power off as fsck was reporting every single block as hosed and it would takegods knows how long for it to go thru both 155MB filesystems on the second disk. I then booted the system from the install disk and aborted the install, which left me at the shell. I mounted /dev/dsk/0s1 on the install disk's /mnt and used /mnt/bin/cat to write a new /mnt/etc/fstab file which didn't include /dev/dsk/1s1 or /dev/dsk/1s3. This final struggle with the 9380E culminated a long and arduous battle with that drive, originally I had it installed as my primary drive and had encountered endless "DEVICE ERROR" messages from the kernel. I tried numerous times to stamp out the bad sectors to no avail, new ones would always appear, like a creeping vine that never ends. I tried re- formatting the drive quite a number of times, and reinstalled ISC Unix on it more times than I can remember. I've had the drive for ~9 to 10 months, and am still within my warranty period if I could get Miniscribe to listen. Every- time I've called them and reported my problems the tech has given me the phone number of a sales guy to contact regarding the problem. I call the number I am given and get a damn recordo-phone, I've left countless messages and never receive any reply. At this point I've given up on Miniscribe and the drive, which is now an expensive doorstop. I can only hope you have better luck than I. BTW, if anyone knows a good place to send a 9380E for repair, I'm all ears. -- Arthur W. Neilson III | ARPA: art@pegasus.com Bank of Hawaii Tech Support | UUCP: uunet!ucsd!nosc!pegasus!art
chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) (06/12/90)
According to dab@cbnewsm.att.com (david.a.berk): >I am contemplating purchasing a Miniscribe 340 MB ESDI drive >model M9830E. Anyone have any experiences with this drive? The machine "tct" runs off of one of these. It works fine in a Compaq Deskpro 386/25. Some time ago I reported that it was generating spontaneous bad blocks. Eventually I had to reformat it, because the bad track table was full. I used the Compaq diagnostics to do a low-level format. Presto! The format came up clean, and no more bad blocks since then. -- Chip, the new t.b answer man <chip@tct.uucp>, <uunet!ateng!tct!chip>