campbell@redsox.bsw.com (Larry Campbell) (12/15/89)
I've just added a new ESDI controller second drive to my 386/ix 2.0.2 system. The controller is a WD1007-SE2; the second drive is an Imprimis 180-or-so-MB 3 1/2" drive. I reformatted both drives using the controller BIOS, ran sysadm addharddisk to configure things, and everything seemed to be ok. Except now scary stuff is happening. Occasionally -- once, twice, maybe three times a day -- a file on the new drive gets corrupted. The file length is OK but some or all blocks in the file are either missing (holes in file) or random other blocks. (If I had to make a guess, I'd say that some disk writes are just not happening at all, or are going to the wrong block on the disk. Might alternate sector mapping be broken?) I have taken to running fsck on the drive at least once a day; it usually finds two or three lost files and one or two files with unwanted holes. The console is not logging ANY disk errors. It is, however, occasionally logging: s5inode: inode already allocated I've seen this message perhaps four or five times since the 2nd drive was installed. Far more than four or five files have been corrupted, though. No disk read or write errors have been reported. The problem affects only the second drive -- the first drive is fine. Now, earlier I tried installing the second drive with a WD1007A-WA2 controller. This didn't work at all -- the controller would hang very quickly. Several people pointed out (thanks again, folks!) that the WD1007A has a design defect that prevents it from operating two drives, and that the WD1007V would solve the problem. Well, the new controller does work a lot better than the old one, but this kind of error really scares me. We really can't tolerate this level of unreliability. Does anyone out there have any clues? How can so many errors which appear to be disk errors be going unreported? Do I just have to give up entirely on running two drives with Western Digital controllers and 386/ix? Help! -- Larry Campbell The Boston Software Works, Inc. campbell@bsw.com 120 Fulton Street wjh12!redsox!campbell Boston, MA 02109