Hard disk crash takes Orville R. Weyrich, Jr. down
A couple days before turkey day my #0 hard drive turned into a pumpkin :-( After spending Thurs, Fri, and Sat working at it, I have managed to steal an ST-277R from my daughter's OS/2 machine and get it to work for my UNIX machine (I lost a ST-4144R, so the space crunch hurts). My backups for the /, /usr, /usr3, and /usr4 file systems loaded fine [after I got the system set up]. My /usr2 file system backup was lost [actually, only the most recent was lost -- I have an old one]. Hardware-types -- please see the bottom of this message! The only good news in all this is that /usr3 and /usr4 had been on a drive that was an ST-4096 pushed to do RLL that was flakey, so I backed it up extra often and didn't put important stuff on it -- it survived, and during the re-installation process I figured out part of why it was flakey -- it was formatted with 1:2 interleave, but the bad track maps that I originally had told Unix were physical cyl/head/sec rather than logical cyl/head/sec. No wonder it had so many HD err messages! Needless to say, I have fixed that. Anyway, I am posting this message all over creation because I had several irons in the fire that were stored on my lost /usr2 file system. If you have sent me e-mail in the past few weeks, read on. Also, if you can recommend a good data recovery service for Unix S51K file systems on ST4144R hard drives, please let me know. My Altos/Xenix/Informix problem -- Thanks for the many replies -- I think that I can carry through now. My request for SAS serial drivers for ESIX 4.0.3 -- someone sent them to me and I passed them on to someone else who asked me for them. I had planned to install them this weekend, but I wound up fighting aligators instead of draining the swamp -- and my copy of the source was on /usr2. Could someone please offer to send me another copy of SAS (or give me information to get then via ftpmail). My request for hardware/software options for building a phone answering and touch-tone response system drew a lot of good responses that have all been lost. I had been planning to summarize to the net this weekend. Sorry. The short summary is that ZyXel (sp?) makes a modem that seems to do what I need, and that someone on the net was putting together a group order for $300 each without software. I am waiting for info from ZyXel -- I have no further contact info left. If anyone else has more info on the general topic of interfacing computers with the phone line to include recording and playback of voice info, DTMF decoding, and caller-id, I would appreciate it if you would let me know. Finally, does anyone know exactly what kind of failure mode I seem to have on my hard drive? The scenario is as follows: 1) Static electricty discharge onto the case of my computer. 2) System locks up and I cand do graceful power-down. 3) Power-back up and my #0 drive makes louder than normal recalibrate head seeking noises. 4) Look at ROM BIOS and the drive tables are zapped -- ROM BIOS thinks that the drives are 0 cyl 0 head 0 sectors/track [Award 386 BIOS]. 5) On Track diagnostic software complains of "SEEK ERRORS" and "CANNOT RECALIBRATE" on my #0 drive. 6) Adaptec ACB-2732 [??] ROM-based HD format complains that drive is not ready [NO, I didn't actually do a low-level format, but I couldn't if I wanted to]. The drive is a full-height Seagate ST-4144R that has functioned perfectly since I bought it from Hard Drives International several years ago. One person told me that it is probably the controller board, that Seagate controller boards are their Archilles heel. Someone else said that it sounded like a head crash. If it is a bad controller board, my chances for resurrecting the drive and data are good; if it is a head crash, then my disk is a door-stop and my data is history. Has anyone ever changed a controller board for a Seagate drive and successfully resurrected the drive? What is involved? Does anyone have a ST-4096 or ST-4144R drive that is known to have a good controller that they want to sell cheap? Thanks, orville. e-mail: uunet.uu.net!weyrich!orville orville%weyrich@uunet.uu.net phone: 602-391-0821 (h) (before 9AM or after 10:30PM MST) 602-279-1440 (w) (between 12:00 noon and 5PM MST) (at other times I implement a Heisenberg uncertainty function).