Thank you for the responses:
Rick Kelly
James Musso
Michael Panayiotakis
Jim Harmon
Steve Franks
Adrian Cole
Chenthil Kumar
Manjeet Rekhi
Summary from the answers : most likely the disk is dead.
Well, it is.
A few details that were not clear from my original message:
(1) the disk was spinning though VERY noisy, but there was a LED on and
the drive appeared to be active.
(2) some suggested to boot from another disk or cdrom and do installboot
I did try that but from a miniroot or another disk I could never see
and could never mount sick boot disk, so I couldn't run installboot.
In fact, probe-scsi was giving me only an externalk disk and nothing
for a boot disk, so I see "Target 1" and not "Target 3".
(3) I should have said sd3 (and not sd0). There was no problem with
mixed or wrong ID's.
(4) some suggested corrupted / or boot block. From miniroot fsck couldn't
see the disk. Same for mount, newfs.
Jim Harmon suggested to power off, and disconnect/reconnect the disk
and do probe-scsi. Well, I did that. Things started looking better for
a short while. The boot didn't go smothly at all. At first I was able to boot
from my sick disk and had all kinds of "media error" messages.
I spent time in format trying to repair and remap the bad blocks. Had plenty
of problems indicating messages (repair failed a few times), format quited
with core dump, Endless messages with bad block numbers...Tried to repair
again and again, and finally was able to do a clean reboot and had clean
filesystems (or so I thought). As the last test I did shutdown and...
back to my original message, with all the same symptoms.
Power off, diconnecting/reconnecting disks, changing the cables, booting
from CD, trying to mount root partition, fsck, etc.. didn't help.
And probe-scsi has no notion of the disk.
At this point I am ordering a replacement.
Nadya Williams
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:59 CDT