Hi,
My original email is at the end.
Thank you for the quick responses from:
Mike Iglesias <iglesias_at_draco.acs.uci.edu>
Alan Rollow <alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com>
Kurt Carlson <SXKAC_at_orca.alaska.edu>
Gyula Szokoly <szgyula_at_skysrv.Pha.Jhu.EDU>
Selden E Ball Jr <SEB_at_LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU>
John Stoffel <john_at_WPI.EDU>
Hellebo Knut <Knut.Hellebo_at_nho.hydro.com>
Doug Gould <dgj_at_omega.rtpnc.epa.gov>
In summary:
Majority of the responses recommended that I simply return the disk,
which I will do as soon as I'm done sending off this email.
The utility to use to format a disk is scu(8) and the estimated time to
format was under a couple of hours.
I got one possible explanation for the newfs behavior from Selden E Ball Jr.
"To me, the disk errorlog entry looks like your Elite 9 disk's firmware
has been trying to reallocate bad blocks and failing. newfs takes
forever because of the delays while the disk's firmware does error
recovery. You should return the drive."
Kurt Carlson gave an interesting report from the latest DECUS meeting.
"I just got back from DECUS and heard a variety of things about the
Seagate 9gb drives. In summary, Digital has provided Seagate with
appropriate firmware fixes so that the drives will work correctly,
but apparently it is still highly unpredictable as to what firmware
level drives are shipped with. Also note that several users
(non-Digital people so we can likely "trust" it) reported that there
was a high level of infant mortality in the Seagate 9gb drives, this
has apparently been rectified "recently". Your first step is likely
to find out the firmware level of each drive and check what level
Digital requires. Second step (assuming first passes) is to check
with the supplier of the failing drive under warranty considerations."
I tried to verify this with DEC and they are not aware of a required
firmware level. From my own experience, we've had 9GB disks for quite some
time now and they are spread over 5 firmware levels and we haven't had
problems. We have returned 9GB disks in the past but they appeared to have
come from the same lot number (a bad patch), but otherwise we've had no
problems. This is my first 9GB disk DOA. These disks come with a 5 year
limited warranty and the cost keep dropping.
Diane Ibaraki
University of Hawaii
High Energy Physics Group
<diane_at_uhheph.phys.hawaii.edu>
----------------------- original email ---------------------------------
I got in 2 new 9gb disk, ST410800N (Seagate Elite9).
I got one of them up and running without any problems the other one
hangs with the newfs command. I'm running Digital Unix 2.0 on
a DEC 3000/300. This is what happens:
# /sbin/newfs /dev/rrz3d <--- this is the command I used
Warning: 1331 sector(s) in last cylinder unallocated
/dev/rrz3d: 4096000 sectors in 1141 cylinders of 27 tracks, 133 sectors
2097.2MB in 72 cyl groups (16 c/g, 29.42MB/g, 6784 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
this looks okay to me but it has taken 24 minutes to get:
32, 57632, 115232, 172832, 230432, 288032, 345632, 403232, 460832,
I eventually have to ctrl/c out of it. I checked the error log
(uerf)
and it did register errors but not every time I try to newfs the disk. (I
have included a sample of uerf output and disklabel info below).
My questions are:
1). What steps do I take to confirm that the disk is bad
before returning it to manufacturer? This disk is recognized by the
system, I can access the disklabel information and it compares with my
other 9gb disk.
2). Do you think formatting the disk would help?
3). How do you format disks on an alpha? About how long will it
take?
Received on Wed Dec 13 1995 - 20:13:13 NZDT