🚀 go-pugleaf

culberts@hplwbc.hpl.hp.com (Bruce Culbertson) writes:

>> 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.

The soft errors only occur for a given block once or twice so
I hope there is only some noise on the SCSI bus.

I'm thinking of doing a low level format and trying again. These
problems occured after the machine had been on for about a day.
Maybe better cooling is needed.


>"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".

fsck has managed to clean it twice now..though I lost 6 blocks somewhere.

>> 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.

Ok, so I'll start debuging the hardware if the drive doesn't work after
the format

>Bruce Culbertson