hue@coney.island.COM (Pond Scum) (03/19/91)
What's the best way to format a SCSI drive? It looks like you have about
five different options as to how to handle the defects (from reading
a Wren manual). Since SCSI drives all seem to be able to do automatic
read and write reallocation, and do reallocation at format time, I thought
it was best to just do the default format and let the drive figure out
the bad blocks itself.
We recently received four (supposedly) new Wren IV drives. Whenever I tried
to format them using Sun's (under SunOS 4.1.1) "format" program, it said
something about a fatal error and quit.
I ended up writing a little driver that would let me play with the mode
select pages and get a little more information about errors and here's what
happened:
I sent a simple format command:
0x04 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00
The drive went off for a few seconds, then responded with a check
condition and I got back the following bytes of extended sense:
0x70 0x00 0x04 0x01 0x28 0xd4 0xfe 0x0a 0x00
0x00 0x00 0x00 0x44 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00
From reading the manual, the 0x44 means "Internal Controller Error". Does
this mean the SCSI controller bolted onto the drive is bad? I was told one
of these drives went to a repair depot and they said there was nothing wrong
with it. Is it possible that they just checked the HDA and not the SCSI
controller?
"Most men expressed little preference, except for douche bags (meaning the
items, not a category of men who were consulted)." -Sydney Biddle Barrows
Jonathan Hue Island Grapics Corp. Graphic Arts Division
4000 Civic Center Drive San Rafael, CA {uunet,sun}!island!hue hue@island.com