/usr/adm/unix.log errors

[Dennis L DeBruler]

One Monday morning I noticed that my disk drive sounded different.  I
checked /usr/adm/unix.log and found some entries of the following
form:

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FF9B CH:FF02 SN:FF0E SC:FF02 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:9500 Mon Feb 22 12:44:26 1988

drv:0 part:2 blk:37687 rpts:1 Mon Feb 22 12:44:29 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FF7E CH:FF02 SN:FF04 SC:FF02 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:DF00 Mon Feb 22 12:52:25 1988

drv:0 part:2 blk:35826 rpts:1 Mon Feb 22 12:52:26 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFBF CH:FF02 SN:FF09 SC:FF01 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:DB00 Mon Feb 22 12:52:52 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFBF CH:FF02 SN:FF09 SC:FF01 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:D900 Mon Feb 22 12:52:56 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFBF CH:FF02 SN:FF09 SC:FF01 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:D900 Mon Feb 22 12:52:57 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFBF CH:FF02 SN:FF09 SC:FF01 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:D900 Mon Feb 22 12:52:58 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFDB CH:FF02 SN:FF0B SC:FF01 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:D500 Mon Feb 22 12:53:44 1988

drv:0 part:2 blk:41781 rpts:1 Mon Feb 22 12:53:50 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFBF CH:FF02 SN:FF09 SC:FF01 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:9100 Mon Feb 22 12:57:10 1988

drv:0 part:2 blk:39988 rpts:1 Mon Feb 22 12:57:10 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFD3 CH:FF02 SN:FF07 SC:FF01 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:9100 Mon Feb 22 13:18:14 1988

drv:0 part:2 blk:41267 rpts:1 Mon Feb 22 13:18:14 1988

HDERR ST:51 EF:10 CL:FFD5 CH:FF02 SN:FF08 SC:FF02 SDH:FF27 DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:97 MCRREG:9100 Mon Feb 22 13:21:51 1988

drv:0 part:2 blk:41396 rpts:1 Mon Feb 22 13:21:51 1988

These entries are from a day a few weeks after they started.  I also
learned on that fateful Monday morning that our building had lost air
conditioning during the weekend.  Back then, our guards were closing the
doors to the rooms and my 3B1 shares the office with a LaserWriter.  Since
the block numbers varied so much, I had assumed that my problem was an
intermittent electronic failure due to overheating.  So I called the Hot
Line, expecting them to interpret the log reports and conclude that the
mother board needed replacement, thus saving the contents of my 67MB disk. 
Unfortunately, he didn't know how to interpret the log entries, his "fix"
was to try reinitialization of the disk.  This is easy for him to say, but
hard for me to do.

There is an option in the diagnostics for recording a bad block in the bad
block table that I would have tried if it was complaining about just one
bad block.  However, since it was complaining about many blocks and
since the machine seemed to recover from the problems OK, I lived with it
while I stewed about what to do.  In the mean time, the battery failed.
(Makes you wonder how long this machine, which I had had for less than 90
days, had set in a warehouse.)  Thus I got a motherboard replacement
anyhow, but the problem did not go away.  Thus I broke down and again backed
up all of my disk by datalinking the files at 9600 baud to my friendly,
neighborhood comp. center machine, reinitialized the disk, and restored the
files.  The reinitialization did not report any bad blocks.  So I did it
twice to make sure.  To my pleasant surprise, when I restored all of the
files, I haven't had a disk log entry since.
-- 
Dennis DeBruler		(312)416-5182		(ihnp4!)ihdld!dld
AT&T-BL			IHP 1F-114