[rescue] How many disks must a man walk down...

[Mr Ian Primus]

I got home from work around 5:00. I've been really wanting to play with my newly retrieved from storage/cleaned up MicroVax 3900. I have had this machine for a couple months and finally have a little free time and space to play with it. So, I've done the basic testing on it, it seems to work properly, and so do the disks.

On to the "simple" part. I want to install NetBSD on it for starters, so I need a mop server. I grabbed a Sun Ultra 2 off the stack of stuff, and decided "This will do nicely".

The Sun has a gig of memory, and a nine gig disk. I set it up with a monitor and keyboard, and went to boot from CD to install Linux. Whirr... click... whine.... Whirr.... click.... whine.... OK, so the disk is dead. Out with the old disk, take the sled off and transfer it to a spare disk. This one is a nine gigabyte IBM drive.

Boot up, probe-scsi-all... that's odd, it reports all kinds of garbage. Oh well, I'll boot from CD and try it - no go, Linux won't see it.

Pull that disk out, swap the sled onto the next spare disk in the stack. A nine gig HP rebadged Quantum disk. Put the disk in, hit the power switch... Whirrrrrrrr..buzzzzzzzzzzzzz...CLUNK...zeeeooooop. Whirrrrrrr...

OK, that one is dead too. Swap the sled onto the next disk in the stack, another nine gig HP rebadged Quantum. Put the disk in, hit the power switch. WhirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR_R_R_R_R_R_R_RRRRR... rrrr.r.r.r.r.rrrrrrRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!
Grrr.. switch off power, slide the (still spinning down) disk out of the side of the machine. Tilt disk a bit as it's still spinning... CLANKitty CLANG Clank klunk klunk. After it stopped, I can clearly hear something loose and rattleing around as I tilt it back and forth.

Swap that sled onto a 4.5 gig Seagate Cheetah. This one makes that horrid Seagate whine, but seems to work... until it hangs the SCSI module trying to access it.


I'm getting really sick of swapping disks. It's amazing just how many drives are dead! Of course, these were all just used pulls from junk, so they may very well have been mistreated before I got them. But they all came from different places, as far as I can remember.

Grrr...

-Ian