IRIS 3030 Disk Problems

[Brent L. Bates AAD/TAB MS294 x42854]

   For beginners, it may not be the disk.  We recently had to return our
storager board, again, for repairs.  It would not recognize either of our
disks or the tape drive, so we couldn't boot the system.  At one point it
looked as if it was going to boot, but then it said the disk was bad and
I know it couldn't be.  We replaced the storager board and the system booted
up fine and NO disk errors appeared.  I don't know if that is any help, but
I thought you should know.
   There is no documentation available on sifex, unless you have the
maintenance manuals and only maintenace people have that.  The formatting
options require a password for use, but those are in the maintenace manual.
   We have 3.6 OS and as far as I know that is the most recent version of
the system.  Section 4.5 of the Owner's Guide is on Crash Recovery and it
shows you how to reload the system from tape.  I have used the section
many times (too many times) to recover the system and I think it is fairly
straight forward to do. Hopefully you shouldn't have any problems.
   If the disk is completely dead, you could buy the same drive from a third
party for at least half the cost that SGI would charge you.  I have heard
from people who have done this and it seems to work.  Of course NO ONE at
SGI would recomend it, but you know how that is.  We have a 380Mb drive on
order, to replace the 170Mb drive that came with our machine.  As soon as
we have that installed and running I will post our results on info-iris.
   Our current drive is a Hitachi 512-17 ESDI drive.  You could probably
order it from a third party and install it your selves without too much
problem. Also I think Hitachi has a 1 year warranty on the drive as opposed
to the 90 day warranty that SGI has.
   I hope this is of some help.
--

	Brent L. Bates
	NASA-Langley Research Center
	M.S. 294
	Hampton, Virginia  23665-5225
	(804) 864-2854
	E-mail: blbates at aero4.larc.nasa.gov or blbates at aero2.larc.nasa.gov