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From: Tim Pierce <twpierce+usenet@mail.bsd.uchicago.edu>
Subject: hardware woes: SCSI tape, floppy, and controllers
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Organization: Direct Frontal Assaults on Bob Dornan
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 09:01:04 GMT
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Hi.
For many moons now I've been running FreeBSD 2.0 with a 2.0.5
kernel (please don't ask). At last I caved in and and sat down to
perform a complete upgrade to 2.1.5. In the process, however, I
discovered more hardware problems than I'd really anticipated.
A note: by posting this, I'm not looking for a silver bullet that
will solve all of my problems. I fully expect to take this
machine into the shop in a few more days. What I want to know is:
what exactly should I say has gone wrong (beyond simply `it
doesn't work'). My experience with soliciting repairs for PC
hardware running Unix is that if you can't couch the problem in
terms of how Windows 95 or Norton Utilities handles it, even the
technicians are reluctant to touch the machine.
SCSI problems
My upgrade mechanism of choice is a WangTEK 6130 DAT; I don't
own a CD-ROM, and happen to have this drive for backups anyway
(it works fine writing and reading tapes on my own system). I
borrowed a SPARC 5 at work and -- setting the blocksize to 10,
as described in the FAQ -- cut a tape containing most of the
2.1.5 distribution. (I'm aware of the infamous `unix-to-unix
tape problem', but was under the vague impression that DATs are
less susceptible to incompatible formats than QIC or other
traditional tape systems. Might the problem be simply that the
Solaris-written DAT is unreadable by the WangTEK? Using dd and
experimenting with a variety of options produced no better
results than tar.)
When trying to read this tape at home, using `tar -t -b 10 -f
/dev/rst0', tar fails and I get the following diagnostic on the
console:
st0(aha0:5:0): MEDIUM ERROR asc:31,1b sks:80,0
According to /sys/scsi/scsi_base.c (see, I've done some of my
homework), this means that the drive returned an error code of
0x70 and additional sense codes of 0x31 and 0x1b. Activating
SCIOCDEBUG on the tape drive seems to confirm this (insofar as I
can decipher the debugging output). Unfortunately, since I am
not familiar with the SCSI spec, I really don't know what this
means, and can't guess as to whether the problem might be the
drive, the controller, the configuration, or none of these. Any
guesses?
Floppy problems
This is probably my more serious immediate problem. I have not
had occasion to use the floppy drive (3.5", high density) in a
very long time. When trying to write a boot floppy:
% /usr/sbin/fdwrite -f boot.flp
... the following messages appear on the console:
fdc0: input ready timeout
fd0c: hard error writing fsbn 0 (No status)
fdc0: direction bit not set
fdc0: cmd c5 failed at out byte 1 of 9
fd0c: hard error writing fsbn 0 of 0-17 (ST0 40<abnrml> ST1
4<sec_not_fnd> ST2 10<wrong_cyl> cyl 0 hd 0 sec 1)
According to an article of J\"org Wunsch's in Deja News, the `no
status' bit means that the drive doesn't recognize the floppy,
and either the drive has ceased to generate index pulses or
something equally catastrophic has occurred. Is this an
accurate summary of the problem? Will it suffice to say that if
I take the machine into the shop?
Thanks for any help.
--
"A person who dies of lung cancer at age 70 will not be hospitalized later
with another disease," said a study released Thursday by [Canada's] Imperial
Tobacco touting the benefits of early death in smokers on the health-care
system. (Reuters, in the Chicago _Tribune_, 9/3/94)