🚀 go-pugleaf

> From: daver!uunet!munnari!eyrie.img.uu.oz.au!marcb@mips.com (Marc A. Boschma)
>
> Wow, now that I have Minix 1.3 on the machine (THANKS HEAPS
> Bruce!) I have noticed quite alot of:
> SCSI ok with recovery. code 0x17, logical address 0x<some address, varies>
> 
> and a few
> 
> SCSI failure, key 0x3, code 0x11, log adr 0x31e, sense buf 0xc462

"Ok with recovery" is a "soft error" -- some random noise or a power
glitch caused a disk operation to a healthy block to fail.  Both Minix
and most SCSI disks retry operations which fail.  This message means
Minix eventually was successful in performing a disk operation which
initially failed.  Minix is trying to say that it is happy and its
file system is intact, but something funny happened with you disk
which you might want to know about.

It is normal and expected that you will see soft errors occasionally
but if you are seeing several a day, you have a problem.  A typical
cause is a defect in the disk surface which makes reading the block
unreliable.  The standard Minix distribution includes a tool for testing
all the blocks on a disk.  Another tool builds a file of all the bad
blocks so that the blocks will not be allocated to files you care about.

If you get frequent retry messages and the block numbers are truly
random, then you have a problem in the drive electronics, its power
supply, or your pc532.  Debugging it might require some creativity.

"SCSI failure" means Minix cannot talk to your disk.  This usually
results in a panic.  If Minix has been successfully talking to your
disk and then suddenly gets a "SCSI failure", then your file system
is likely to be corrupted.  Cross your fingers and run fsck after you
debug and correct the problem.  If your file system is really in bad
shape but you are desperate to save your data, you might have some
success with the disk editor "de".

> Is it just the driver (remember its Minix 1.3) or could there be a problem
> with the drive (a Mini-Scribe) ?

1.3 has a pretty good SCSI driver, though not perfect.  Many people
have used it with Mini-Scirbe drives.  I do not think the 1.5h driver
is substantially different from the 1.3 driver.

Bruce Culbertson