Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!ucbvax!agate!shelby!helens!baroque!jim From: jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi Subject: Bad tapes again!!!! Message-ID: Date: 19 Sep 90 03:42:19 GMT Sender: news@helens.Stanford.EDU Distribution: comp Organization: Stanford University Lines: 28 Two out of the last thirty tapes we've gotten from SGI have been bad. I just spent most of the day trying to track down a replacement for the IRIX 3.3.1 Maintenance Tape which arrived this morning. I was enthusiastically installing it (because I thought it contained a bug fix I need) when the installation bombs in midstream. Our 4D/220's 150MB drive encountered errors part way through the tape. Repeated attempts failed. Ditto on a 4D/80's 60MB drive. I try everything. It turns out a Sun-3's ancient 60MB drive (which regularly backs up a gigabyte of disk and has never been cleaned or maintained) can read the tape without errors, so I finally dd'ed the distribution onto a new tape and finished the aborted installation. Still, it's kinda inconvenient when an installation fails and leaves your machine with a partial brain transplant. Now, 2 out of 30 is a 7% failure rate. With 6 tapes in average distribution, this would imply a 36% chance of at least one tape in the distribution being bad! So either I have really rotten luck, two bad tape drives, or SGI has a big problem someplace. Anyone else looking forward to CD distributions? Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics Durand 012 Stanford University FAX: (415) 725-3377 (jim@KAOS.stanford.edu) Work: (415) 723-9127