Miniscribe 340 MB Drive

Art Neilson art at pegasus.com
Wed Jun 6 17:34:00 AEST 1990


In article <1990Jun5.162206.17283 at cbnewsm.att.com> dab at cbnewsm.att.com (david.a.berk) writes:
>I am contemplating purchasing a Miniscribe 340 MB ESDI drive
>model M9830E.   Anyone have any experiences with this drive?
>
>
>			Dave Berk
>			..!att!emdbl1!dab
>			(201) 564-3294

Mine just crapped out on me this past weekend, it squealed as if in mortal pain
and I had to power off the system to stop the squealing. I had the 9380E set up
as the second drive in the system, and had been doing a find on the drive when
the squealing occurred.  After powering the system back up, fsck of course tried
cleaning the filesystems on the 9380E after dutifully cleaning those on my
primary drive, a brand new ST4393E a.k.a CDC WREN V.  As soon as fsck started
phase 1 on /dev/dsk/1s1, the awful squealing began again.  My only recourse was
to power off as fsck was reporting every single block as hosed and it would takegods knows how long for it to go thru both 155MB filesystems on the second disk.
I then booted the system from the install disk and aborted the install, which
left me at the shell.  I mounted /dev/dsk/0s1 on the install disk's /mnt and
used /mnt/bin/cat to write a new /mnt/etc/fstab file which didn't include
/dev/dsk/1s1 or /dev/dsk/1s3.  This final struggle with the 9380E culminated
a long and arduous battle with that drive, originally I had it installed as
my primary drive and had encountered endless "DEVICE ERROR" messages from the
kernel.  I tried numerous times to stamp out the bad sectors to no avail, new
ones would always appear, like a creeping vine that never ends.  I tried re-
formatting the drive quite a number of times, and reinstalled ISC Unix on it
more times than I can remember.  I've had the drive for ~9 to 10 months, and
am still within my warranty period if I could get Miniscribe to listen.  Every-
time I've called them and reported my problems the tech has given me the phone
number of a sales guy to contact regarding the problem.  I call the number I
am given and get a damn recordo-phone, I've left countless messages and never
receive any reply.  At this point I've given up on Miniscribe and the drive,
which is now an expensive doorstop.  I can only hope you have better luck than 
I.  BTW, if anyone knows a good place to send a 9380E for repair, I'm all ears. 
-- 
Arthur W. Neilson III		| ARPA: art at pegasus.com
Bank of Hawaii Tech Support	| UUCP: uunet!ucsd!nosc!pegasus!art



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