SUMMARY : dead boot disk

From: Nadya Williams (nadya@bog.ucsd.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 16 1997 - 13:53:48 CDT


Thank you for the responses:
Rick Kelly
James Musso
Michael Panayiotakis
Jim Harmon
Steve Franks
Adrian Cole
Chenthil Kumar
Manjeet Rekhi

Summary from the answers : most likely the disk is dead.
Well, it is.

A few details that were not clear from my original message:
(1) the disk was spinning though VERY noisy, but there was a LED on and
    the drive appeared to be active.
(2) some suggested to boot from another disk or cdrom and do installboot
    I did try that but from a miniroot or another disk I could never see
    and could never mount sick boot disk, so I couldn't run installboot.
    In fact, probe-scsi was giving me only an externalk disk and nothing
    for a boot disk, so I see "Target 1" and not "Target 3".
(3) I should have said sd3 (and not sd0). There was no problem with
    mixed or wrong ID's.
(4) some suggested corrupted / or boot block. From miniroot fsck couldn't
    see the disk. Same for mount, newfs.

Jim Harmon suggested to power off, and disconnect/reconnect the disk
and do probe-scsi. Well, I did that. Things started looking better for
a short while. The boot didn't go smothly at all. At first I was able to boot
from my sick disk and had all kinds of "media error" messages.
I spent time in format trying to repair and remap the bad blocks. Had plenty
of problems indicating messages (repair failed a few times), format quited
with core dump, Endless messages with bad block numbers...Tried to repair
again and again, and finally was able to do a clean reboot and had clean
filesystems (or so I thought). As the last test I did shutdown and...
back to my original message, with all the same symptoms.

Power off, diconnecting/reconnecting disks, changing the cables, booting
from CD, trying to mount root partition, fsck, etc.. didn't help.
And probe-scsi has no notion of the disk.
At this point I am ordering a replacement.

Nadya Williams



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