Disk Gobble-d-gook

[Robert R. Kessler]

One of our customers had a strange occurrence that I was wondering if
anyone else has seen.  They are running an IBM PS/2 Model 80, with an
8 port Hostess board, and a Mountain Tape Drive.  They have 4 Meg of
memory and the 115 Meg Disk drive.  We haven't upgraded them to 2.3
yet, so they are running the last 2.2 version of SCO Xenix.

One evening, they were quitting for the day and doing their nightly
backup.  This is accomplished by getting everyone out of the system,
doing a shutdown, then logging in as backup and putting in the tape.
When the tar finished, she pulled the tape out and suddenly the system
just shut itself down.  Odd.  Anyway, she then rebooted (doing an
fsck, which she said found lots of problems -- although we don't have
any specific details) and it seemed to come up fine.  She then started
"NIGHTRUN" which does various nightly tasks.  It printed a few pages
and then the system crashed again.

We then did some investigating and discovered that the disk had become
nearly totally trashed.  Some directories and their files were totally
missing.  Other files had sizes of 4 Gigabytes, their status was
changed to c instead of d for directory, etc. etc. etc.  It was really
a mess.

Luckily, the backup that she had done was successful and we were able
to recover the various parts of the system that were trashed.
However, I am worried that there is something lurking there that could
bite us again.  Could it be a hardware problem?  Power problem?  Does
anyone have any ideas?  We will be calling SCO today for their advice.

Thanks.
B.