Re: dying scsi drive?
Bob McElrath <bob+debian-alpha@mcelrath.org> wrote:
>Append root=/dev/sda1 to your boot command in /etc/aboot.conf. (I
>assume you're using aboot not milo?)
Right, using aboot, but I can't access the disk. I can't read partition table -> can't mount any partitions.
>Did you partition this disk or format /dev/sda without any partitions?
Yes, I partitioned it into 6 partitions. I removed the old ones and made the new ones with bsd style disklabels (like adviced by the installer before it launched fdisk).
>The lack of a partition table might cause this problem. Why do you have
>the message "Unable to read /dev/sda"? It should always be sda1 or
>sda2.
I get that message from running fdisk (in the second terminal of the installer)
# fdisk /dev/sda
That is, using a device name rather than partition name. I understand that it can't read the disk at all and does not know anything of any partition that the drive might have.
>If sector 0 truly is bad, this drive may be unusable. Many modern
>drives however keep an internal bad blocks list and will reallocate a
>block from their spares when one goes bad. Play around with the
>smartctl program in the debian package smartsuite, and try 'badblocks -n
>/dev/sda' after booting off a cd-rom (/dev/sda? must not be mounted).
There is a fare chance that the drive is dead. The drive makes an unhealthy noise when something is read from the disk. It is rather old (date code 9902) and it has been in a server application previously. Lately the box has been in storage (off) for some time. I've understood that the bearings don't fancy that and might get stuck (or something like that). To my knowledge this beast doesn't boot from cd (I'm using floppies). I might give it a try, though.
(For the record, I have 3-4 years of experience in debian on x86/ide hw. Never had and alpha nor scsi drive before.)
Cheers,
Mika
>
>labrahemmo@netscape.net [labrahemmo@netscape.net] wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I recently got an alpha 164LX that had a working tru64 installation and it booted fine. Now I've been trying to install the box with debian, but I've run into problems with my scsi drive (seagate medalist st34520n). I installed debian once and all went seemingly fine, but when I tried to boot the freshly installed base system kernel paniced because it could not read the partition table of the drive (that had the root partition). The error message was something like:
>>
>> partition check:
>> sda: scsi0: MEDIUM ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0,
>> CDB: Read(10) 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00
>> info fld=0x0, Current sd08:00: sense key Medium Error
>> Additional sense indicates Unrecovered read error
>> scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
>> unable to read partition table
>> VFS: cannot open root device 08:01
>> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01
>>
>> Restarting the installation cannot check partition table of the drive at boot time, but continues until it's time to partition the drive and tries to start fdisk in an infinite loop. Running fdisk on the second terminal produces an error message "Unable to read /dev/sda".
>>
>> I suspect that the drive is dying. Is there anything else to do? Could this be a "feature" caused by the late tru64 installation?
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