disk warning

[Rion Cassidy]

You may remember me from my "reliablity questions" survey that I did a
while back.  Many of you responded with amazement that anyone could
have so many hardware problems with their IRIS.  I am posting this as
a follow up because we have been given a *HINT* from SGI that our disk
problems MAY HAVE BEEN caused by mistakes made by others.  Note that I
use the word HINT here, because they have made no specific admissions
in that regard, and I don't intend to put words in their mouth (or
libel myself).

As bad as our problems had been, only a couple of weeks after posting
my survey, our disk went down again.  The tech put in another new disk
drive, but we suddenly had 10 meg less disk space to use (50 as
opposed to 60 before).  We assumed he had done *something* wrong.  We
had been very tight on disk space before, so of course we insisted he
come back and do things *properly*.

I'm going to cut out a lot of the intervening conversations here and
give you an important observation made by a senior level engineer at
SGI:

>Our disk had been improperly formatted initially, giving us more
>storage space, but putting it in a position to crap out when the disk
>capacity is reached.

So now we have about 11 less meg of disk space, but it is formatted
reliably.  I did not format our disk.  It is my belief that someone
from SGI has always done that (until this week).  And now we are being
told that the way it was done previously caused our disk problems.  I am
wondering how many users out there have the same potential problem.  A
sure sign is that if you have the 72 meg disk with 60 meg of usable
storage, because that's what we had.

I'm posting this to warn others of the potential disk problems. My
suggestion is that if you have a maintenance contract, you write down
all your pertinent disk statistics and give the hotline a call.  Tell
them that you want to verify that your disk is not a potential basket
case due to improper formatting.


Rion Cassidy							
Ford Aerospace
rion at ford-wdl1.arpa
...{sgi,sun,ucbvax}!wdl1!rion

Disclaimer: I speak only for myself.  The opinions expressd here are
mine, not my employers.