Thanks to those who responded. The quick answer is something on the SCSI
controller card died.
Original post:
=====
Sometime on Saturday the external 1.3G disk on a SPARC 2 'vanished' from
the scsi bus. We discovered it this morning. Rebooting/power-cycling didn't
help. All other devices show up if I do a probe-scsi, (the disk is the
first device in the chain).
I have backups of the data, but time and expense considerations require
some attempt at resurrecting the drive, if possible. All comments, ideas,
info related to the fix and/or the cause will be appreciated and summarized.
=====
Most of the responses involved checking cables, SCSI addresses, etc. which
I had already done with no success. Peter Sivo mentioned someone who had
somehow lost the /dev entries for a drive, but since the drive didn't show
up on a probe-scsi that wasn't the problem. The power supply was mentioned;
not the problem but I hadn't thought to check it.
There were also a few "me, too" messages, along with a tip from Don Gilbert
that you can get compatible drives from Alliance Peripheral Systems if you
spend the extra for the Sun cables. We've been getting all our Mac drives
from them for some time now.
However, the likely answer was that the SCSI controller died. This is a
not uncommon problem with embedded SCSI drives (several of our Macs went
the same way), but unfortunately I didn't have a spare drive to try Ron
Vasey's suggestion of swapping components.
In the end it turned out that we didn't have a recent enough backup of
the filesystem, and the drive is now winging its way to the data recovery
shop. (The user said he would be responsible for his own backups, and
has since had his knees stapled together :-).
Thanks again to:
chris@invmms.WorldBank.Org (Chris Bulle)
vasey@issi.com
uunet!genrad.com!smb (Steve M. Blumenau)
uunet!key.amdahl.com!peter (Peter Sivo)
valdes@geosun.uchicago.edu John Valdes
jungsj@nynexst.com (Shana-Ji Jung)
uunet!xerox.com!Perry_Hutchison.Portland
gauthier@fresnel.telecom.hydro.qc.ca (Jean-Benoit Gauthier)
gilbert@bio.indiana.edu "Don Gilbert"
Mike Raffety <uunet!il.us.swissbank.com!miker>
--- Mike Steadman Artel Communications Corp. Software Engineer 22 Kane Industrial Dr. myk@artel.com Hudson, MA 01749 (508) 562-2100 Fax: (508) 562-6942
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