Bad tapes again!!!!

[James Helman]

Two out of the last thirty tapes we've gotten from SGI have been bad.

I just spent most of the day trying to track down a replacement for
the IRIX 3.3.1 Maintenance Tape which arrived this morning.  I was
enthusiastically installing it (because I thought it contained a bug
fix I need) when the installation bombs in midstream.  Our 4D/220's
150MB drive encountered errors part way through the tape.  Repeated
attempts failed.  Ditto on a 4D/80's 60MB drive.  I try everything.
It turns out a Sun-3's ancient 60MB drive (which regularly backs up a
gigabyte of disk and has never been cleaned or maintained) can read
the tape without errors, so I finally dd'ed the distribution onto a
new tape and finished the aborted installation.

Still, it's kinda inconvenient when an installation fails and leaves
your machine with a partial brain transplant.

Now, 2 out of 30 is a 7% failure rate.  With 6 tapes in average
distribution, this would imply a 36% chance of at least one tape in the
distribution being bad!  So either I have really rotten luck, two bad
tape drives, or SGI has a big problem someplace.

Anyone else looking forward to CD distributions?

Jim Helman
Department of Applied Physics			Durand 012
Stanford University				FAX: (415) 725-3377
(jim at KAOS.stanford.edu) 			Work: (415) 723-9127