ndg503@csc.anu.edu.au (Nick Guoth) (03/12/91)
Hi, Finally, as promised before here is a summary of the responses that I received with regard to my question about the problems I was having with our optical drive. First of all here is the question that I placed on the net: >Hi, > >I need some desparate help. I have been using a Relax Optical Drive to >do my backups. Last Saturday, it just seemed to have stopped working. >When I moved the optical drive to another machine, there was that famous >message "This disk is unreadable, do you want to initialize it". So I >tried some of the standard recovery tools: 1st Aid HFS and SUM. Neither >of these two seemed to recognize the drive at all. > >Have I lost my files? > >thanx, There were five answers and I thank those who replied. (1) jalden@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Joshua M. Alden) (2) time@tbomb.ice.com (Tim Endres) (3) Robert Dal Santo <robert@psych.psy.uq.oz.au> (4) manuel@cnam.cnam.fr (Manuel Bouyssou) (5) mead%hamal.usc.edu@usc.edu (Dick Mead) (1) Apart from calling Symantec to be sure that you have the proper configuration file for your drive, I think what you're looking at is a hardware failure. I repair hard drive to finance my education, and SUM is the best there is at seeing disks that are trying not to mount. Let me ask a few questions: have you tried going through the routine manually? Often SUM won't mount it automatically, but will mount it if you point it at the drive and say, "Right here, stupid." Go through the first 3 or 4 screens until you get to the one where you can scan for a drive. Hit flower-M to go to manual configure, then hit the Add button, select your drive in the SCSI chain, and specify a configuration file if necessary. If it then runs a scan and doesn't find anything, it's time to send it to the company you got it from. But SUM is good; if it's not hardware, you'll be able to get it back. (2) I have a horrible peice of code that ONLY runs under the MPW shell that will scan the directory leaves one by one, thus avoiding the dependency on a valid directory (usually the death), and will let you pull any file it can find in there. I have used this a dozen times to get stuff back. As long as the SCSI driver can read sectors from the disk and the partition table is valid, you can get files back. Sometimes not all, but many. Let me know if you wish to try this thing, and I'll send it out. (3) We just had a problem today with a Magneto Optical Drive. A disk started getting errors about unreadbale blocks. What we did was very carefully open the disk case and lightly brush the disk surface with a lint free cloth. There were a few noticable minute (approx 0.1mm) specks on the surface. After that the disk seemed fine. If all else faisl and you've got nothing to lose then give it a try. (4) I had have the same problems with a Sony SMO. In fact usch devices must be cleaned every 2 months, with a little brush to sweep out the lens. I'm also use a vacumm cleaner to remove all the dust. Concerning your problem did you tried to use the Norton Utilities first ? when I have crash I try to reconstruct MOD directory, with the Nortons and after that to use Sum II. The BIG problem with relax, is that they use Ricoh mechanism which seems to be incompatible with the rest of the Sony "world". I cannot read or write MOD formatted with a relax (and the reverse is also true), because relax use its own format, not the ISO one !!! If you cannot succeed with the Nortons disk repair tools, don't use to use the recover from Norton utilities which I found very useless comparing to SUM II (no hierarchy, so when you recover files all your folders are on the same level). I really recommend you to clean your relax, since that time I've no more troubles with my Sony MOD :-) (5) Before giving up on the drive, try cleaning the optics. Dust can stop OD's from working. --------------- After a little bit more investigation, I found out that the Optical Drive itself was the item that had crashed. In finding this out I learned a few rather interesting things. In answer (1) Joshua explains the use of the manual interface in the volume recovery procedure. From this I was able to find out that there was no Volume Information File (VIF) for the Relax Optical. When I talked to Symantec here in Australia, they suggested for me to go through a series of steps, and at the end contact the Hardware people to obtain the relevant information requested on the last screen. This is the sequence: Run SUM Disk Clinic Choose Recover Volume Choose Deleted File Record is NOT installed Choose Volume Scan this will bring you to the SUM Disk Clinic program Choose Advanced from the Edit menu Choose Recover Parameters from the Advanced menu This will bring up the window with a number of options to be filled in by the user. Here is where you need to contact your distributor/manufacturer to obtain the relevant information for the SCSI Parameters and the Recover Parameters. Enter the new parameters Choose Save Volume Info File from the Advanced menu It may be a good idea to do this with all your non SUM-known devices, before thay break down on you. You really do not need the device to be mounted or even connected to get the information. The relevant information is shown in the diagram on page 5-20 of the SUM manual. As the problem lay with the drive and not the cartridge (the information on these was not affected) we have returned the drive to the distributors and are leaving it in their court. I hope the above information may be able to help some other people when they have problems similar to this in the future. /-----------------------------------------------------------------\ nick guoth ndg503@csc.anu.edu.au Research School of Chemistry Computing Unit Australian National University Canberra, AUSTRALIA "Happiness is a piece of fudge caught on the first bounce" - Snoopy \-----------------------------------------------------------------/