i recently inherited a 2100/500MP and have been tangling with the
%$#_at_ swxcr ever since. here's the story:
the last sysadmin popped a bunch of new (in the sense that they are
replacements provided by dec in sealed plastic bags --
remanufactured?) rz28's and rz28m's into the machine, marked them as
optimal, disklabelled them as 'rz28' (or left them unlabelled) and
then newfs'd them. the disks run for a few days, then trip offline
suddenly. sometimes there are references to bad block reads (e.g.,
during dumps). recovery requires use of swxcrmgr to reset them as
'optimal', but this doesn't last very long, which is annoying.
i've seen reference in the archives to the following:
- you need to low-level format the drives before putting them under
swxcr control
- the rz28's need to have certain firmware revs before being put under
swxcr control
- you need to disklabel as 're' or 'SWXCR', not as rz28
i suspect these things just have a bunch of bad blocks or are
otherwise defective, but if anyone can
- refer me to the documentation that says the things above
- provide some good war stories that might provide clues
i'd appreciate it greatly. things were more or less fine until this
last batch of disks went in, which suggests that either we got a bunch
of defective disks (of varying model) or the last sysadmin forgot a
step.
--
Paul M. Aoki | University of California at Berkeley
aoki_at_CS.Berkeley.EDU | Dept. of EECS, Computer Science Division #1776
| Berkeley, CA 94720-1776
Received on Mon Dec 02 1996 - 23:28:39 NZDT