sbmueller@lion.waterloo.edu (stephan()) (11/18/90)
Sigh. One year and one week ago I purchased a Rodime 5180S 140Meg SCSI hard drive. It worked wonderfully until this morning. It's connected to a Comspec SA1000 host adapter which is in turn connected to an A1000. This morning, it refused to read the Unit Info File (the equivalent of a partition table.) Various experiments revealed it is in fact a drive problem; I tried the drive connected to other Amigas and other controllers. A Media Check (i.e. read all logical blocks on drive) yielded errors on pretty much every cylinder, every head, sector 0. I mapped out the bad blocks up to cylinder 3 or so (about 20 sectors in total) before moving onwards; there's no way I was going to do this for the whole drive. Anyone have any ideas on why the drive should suddenly dislike sector 0 everywhere? I had faithfully parked the heads the night before, before shutting down; there were no earthquakes last night to bother the drive. At this point, I resigned myself to losing the first partition, and started a low-level format, which I halted after formatting several tracks; the theory being that I could then write new partition info to the disk, (allowing it to be booted and recognized by AmigaDOS) and possibly recover some of the stuff in the higher partitions. Halting the formatting was done by (ahem) powering off the drive. This should have been harmless, I thought, since I was going to do a complete low-level format shortly anyway. Anyway, the drive powered back up and refused to let me do anything to it, since it cleverly realized it was in an inconsistent state. So much for writing new partition info. Fine. I'll give up all the data (I do have most of it on floppies) so let's just low-level format the whole thing. Nada. The drive refuses to let me do even that. Most every operation gives me SCSI error -1. I can still park the heads, query drive type and read capacity. Request sense after a failed attempt to do anything else (including Mode Select and Format) yields code $03. SCSI error -1 is 'Command did not complete' Sense Key code $03 is 'Media Error' - indicates that last command terminated with a non-recovered error condition. A defective block will be reassigned. Any thoughts? What do I have to do to tell this drive to format independent of previously failed commands? The reason I mentioned that I bought the drive 1 year and 1 week ago is that it had a 1 year warranty. sigh again. thanx in advance stephan(); Please email any wisdom (and contributions to the stephan mueller hard drive repair fund :-) as I'm kind of short on time to peruse this group.