[rescue] SGI I2 Impact rather cheap on eBay

[Matthew Haas]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Kurt Huhn wrote:
>
> I was writing of CDROMS, but then it hit me that you were talking about hard
> drives - which is still just as puzzling.  I've used all manner of hard
> drives in all sizes in my SGIs.  You just have to be sure to excercise the
> disk before you do *anything* - if it previously came from a non-sgi
> machine.  Other than that, no worries, and nothing wierd ever happened.  I
> did have a drive once that I knew was old and crusty, but tried it in an
> Indigo anyway just for shits and giggles.  It did, of course, fail the disk
> check.  Another machine took the drive fine, but the drive suffered a sever
> failure not long afterward.
>

 Taking what both you and Dave M. said, I will be experimenting on my
Indigo2 at some point this week and will post my results.

 Right now I've got the following suggestions to go by:

- Using fx, verify the block size of the hard drive is in  512-byte
  blocks.

- Exercise the disk (standard butterfly sweep I assume?)

- Create and write an SGI disklabel to these disks. (This is one point
  where I used to start getting the errors, during the actual writing of
  the label.. but I'll post more specifics when I start playing with it).

- If all else succeeds, put a filesystem on the disk and see if IRIX likes
  it.

---
 Matthew Haas           Squirrel's Law #209203923: "Thou shalt ignoreth
 Corning/Geneseo, NY       all RAM specifications, they're noo scottish"