Hitachi DK815 loses tracks 0 and 1 when reinstalling drive

[Dan Lorenzini]

We have about 15 Hitachi DK815-10 (892 MB) disk drives attached to six
servers: 2 3/180's, 3 3/280's and a 4/280.  Since we tend to reconfigure
our systems frequently, we sometimes move a drive from one machine to
another (for instance, we will format a drive on one machine, and install
it in anther, to reduce downtime on a production machine).  We never had
problems with this, but since we upgraded our XY451's to XY7053 (a.k.a.
SMD-4) controllers, sometimes this procedure causes the newly-installed
drive to have errors on tracks 0 and 1.  The symptoms are that fsck cannot
read block 16, and when format is used in "analyze" mode it maps all the
sectors in tracks 0 and 1 out to the spare tracks.  Although the disk is
usable this way, it results in inefficiencies in accessing files on the
root partition.  Also, a full reformat using the original defect list
works and the problem goes away.

Has anyone noticed this or a similar problem for this configuation?  This
has happened to three different drives in the last month.  Any help you
can give would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Dan Lorenzini
Greenwich Capital Markets
203-625-2779
dal at gcm.com     (UUCP: sun!sunrise!norwalk!gcm!dal)