Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cica!ctrsol!ginosko!uunet!seismo!esosun!cogen!celerity!celit!rory
From: rory@celerity.uucp (Thomas (Rory) Bolt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: SE/30 and Hard-Drives
Message-ID: <392@celit.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jul 89 16:40:02 GMT
References: <23@<Jul> <126900060@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@celerity
Reply-To: rory@celerity.UUCP (Thomas (Rory) Bolt)
Organization: FPS Computing Inc., San Diego CA
Lines: 21


	I have also had intermittant problems with the hard drive in my SE/30.
My setup is a SE/30, 4MB ram, and an Apple 80MB internal disk drive (Quantum).
The symptom is that the machine will not boot from the hard disk, and if booted
from a floppy the hard disk will not show up. I tried cycling the power, zapping
parameter ram, etc... to no avail. Usually the machine would just decide to
become bootable again of its own free will within 10-15 minutes. Once the machine
would not boot for a 24 hour period. Since I am a consultant specializing in
SCSI peripherals, I was able to hook up a SCSI bus analyzer when the drive was
in its confused state... (a matter of having all the equipment available when
the drive was misbehaving - a rare occurance :-) ). Anyway, the drive was 
reporting a check condition on all accesses to the media. Upon issueing a request
sense command, the drive returned a sense key of 0x04 (hardware error) and an
extended sense code of 0xC8 (vendor unique error code :-( ). My machine was under
warranty so I had my drive replaced, and I told the Apple repair center the
information I had found, but to my dismay the paperwork that was sent to Apple
said only "Drive won't boot - sometimes.". Since this was a very intermittant
problem for me (three occurances in a little over a month of constant use) I am
posting this information in the hopes that it will help someone at Apple or
Quantum. I have no doubts that when they received my old drive and tested it,
they found no problem.