Frequent Disk Crashing on DEC 2000/433.

From: <nvbr_at_iitk.ernet.in>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 00:37:56 +0530

Dear Managers,
     I am facing with a serious problem which I never faced before.
     On one of my DEC 2000/433 (with 2 cpus) running DU 3.2D
     I faced disk crash on 3 occasions in the last 8 months.
     On my other DEC systems and old SUN 3/60 systems I never
     faced disk failures so often.

     Are these disks more sensitive to temparature and dust ?
     Sometimes we allow the systems to run at 27-28 degrees C also.
     This is not a humid place.
     I was in the feeling that the new disks are more rugged.
     (I guess they are HOT pluggable, but I rarely need this
      facility now)

     What else may be the problem?
      
     I am getting a message which says that there is an
     unrecoverable hardware error on media. Says several
     consequetive blocks are unreadable.

     Is there any chance of recovering data from the disk?
     (I can afford to re-format, but as a matter of hacking,
       I may like to extract data from the disk)
     And again, it may fail!
     What measures I have to take in future?
     What disk scanning utilities I have to run periodically to
     check the consistency of disk.
     Is their any way to reduce(if not avoid) surprise disk
     failures.
     (I can not afford disk-mirroring etc. I do not want
      full fault tolerance, I prefer more reliability)
  
     The disk paramters are:
# /dev/rrz2a:
type: SCSI
disk: RZxx
label:
flags: dynamic_geometry
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 140
tracks/cylinder: 9
sectors/cylinder: 1260
cylinders: 3703
sectors/unit: 4238836
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0 # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0 # milliseconds
drivedata: 0

8 partitions:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg]
  a: 2048000 0 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 0 - 1625*)
  b: 0 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - -1)
  c: 4238836 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 3364*)
  d: 0 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - -1)
  e: 0 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - -1)
  f: 0 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - -1)
  g: 1024000 2048000 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 1625*- 2438*)
  h: 1166836 3072000 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 2438*- 3364*)


Thanks for any advice/solution in this regard.

Brahmaji
Received on Tue Mar 25 1997 - 20:50:43 NZST

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