jacquemin-michel@cs.yale.edu (Michel Jacquemin) (06/28/91)
My father bought a Syquest drive 6 months ago (exact brand unknown) and it seems to have trouble formatting cartridges. He has been using 4 Syquest brand cartridges for the last 6 months with no apparent problem. Then, he bought 2 new cartridges (Mass Microsystems brand), could not format them, so he had them formatted at a local store. They worked fine for one backup, then started having problems: backup gets stuck after some time. Tried with one of the older cartridges: no problem (so the drive is OK). Tried again with the new cartridge: fail. From then on, all cartridges failed in the middle of the backup. The store which sold the drive went under 2 months ago. The system setup is: a Mac SE/30 w/ 2 Meg and 40 Meg HD, running system 6.0.3 (I think). There is a formatting program coming with the drive, called Smart Format. When trying to "test" the cartridge, it stops after some time with the following message: SCSI error occured Sense Key: $04 Hardware Error Add'l sense code: $02 No seek complete Logical block #: $000022EE When trying to format the cartridge, it stops with the following message Could not format Device because SCSI error occured Sense Key: $03 Medium Error Add'l sense code: $32 No defect spare Location available Logical #: $00002525 Because of the previous message, I suspect that the formatting program can't deal very well with defective blocks (just a guess). Could that be the case? Would using a different formatting program (I have seen Silverlining mentioned here before) make a difference? Please reply by email. Thanks. Michel Jacquemin (jacquemin@cs.yale.edu, ...!uunet!yale!jacquemin) -- "Le monde entier est un cactus, il est impossible de s'assoir" Jacques Dutronc