RE: dying scsi drive?
Hello again.
I've further diagnosed my setup and would like to give you more details of the chain of events.
The box had originally SRM 5.4 (outdated, I know it now), an ASUS PCI-SC200 SCSI controller and the Medalist I mentioned earlier. It installed fine, but began to produce error when I was downloading additional packeges after booting the base system (from a boot floppy). You know this story...
Afterwards, I've acquired an AHA-2940UW and an IBM DDRS-34560. The install went fine but I didn't dare to install many software before I was sure this controller-drive combination would work.
The IBM appeared to be noisy as hell and I bought a Seagate ST318436LW. Again, installing the base system went without errors and, again, disk errors occurred when I was downloading additional packages.
Only at this point I realized my SRM wasn't up-to-date and the Adaptec SCSI controller was not supported by the old version. I installed the latest available and since then the Adaptec was fully recognized by SRM. However, the both Seagates remain dead :( The old Medalist is recognized by the controller, but I still cannot access the drive. The new Barracuda is not even recognized as if it was not connected or powered.
So I now have one working install on the IBM disk.
My question is, can this kind of disk failures be caused by old SRM and unsupported SCSI controller, that is, can faulty drivers kill devices physically? Or is it a problem with the Seagates not being compatible with my SCSI controllers. I would really like to save the 18Gb Barracuda.
Again, bare in mind that this is my first alpha or SCSI system.
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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