Summary: Is my disk drive dying?

From: thos@gargoyle.uchicago.edu
Date: Mon Dec 10 1990 - 10:08:23 CST


  A few days agoI asked this group about "disk sequencer" messages
coming from a Fujitsu off a Xylogics 451. The majority opinion was that
the drive is indeed dying - that a reformat may postpone the inevitable
for a while but that the platter surfaces are deteriorating. There were
however some votes for a bad controller and some for a bad cable.
  I'll probably reformat the drive first and only swap out the controller
if that does no good whatsover. The cable hasn't been perturbed in
years so my guess is that's it's OK.
  Thanks to the following for
their quick and helpful replies:

        "Anthony A. Datri" <convex!datri@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu>
        Michael S. Maiten <msm@energetic.com>
        "Matt Crawford" <matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu>
        James Davenport <jhd@maths.bath.ac.uk>
        vasey@mcc.com (Ron Vasey)
        David Tock <dit@kc.aberdeen.ac.uk>
        Rick Dipper <rick@wiau.medical-biophysics.manchester.ac.uk>
        Andy Sherman <andys@ulysses.att.com>

- Tom Barron <thos@cs.uchicago.edu>

 
Here is the original query:
--------------------------
To: sun-managers@eecs.nwu.edu
Subject: Is my disk drive dying?
Date: Mon, 03 Dec 90 09:43:14 -0600
From: thos@gargoyle.uchicago.edu

  For about a week now I've been getting
bursts of messages like the following (off
and on):
   Nov 30 03:17:04 isis vmunix: read restore (disk sequencer error) --
blk #nnn, abs blk# mmm
Sometimes it's a write restore rather than read restore. There's no pattern in the
block numbers.

  Is my drive or my controller dying, or what?

  Configuration: Sun 4/380 (upgraded 3/180 to sparc 370 type CPU), Xylogics 451
controller with Fujitsu M2351 drive, Ciprico Rimfire 3200 with Fujitsu M2382.
Note that the diagnostic pertains to the Xylogics/M2351 combination, on which
I have /, swap space, and /usr/local. The block numbers in the diagnostic message
range over the three partitions.

  Please reply to me and I will summarize.

  Thanks,

  Tom Barron
  <thos@cs.uchicago.edu> 312/702-8850



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:00 CDT