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From: J.Purchase@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Jan Purchase)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux
Subject: SCSI timeouts under A/UX
Message-ID: <1361@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 13 Jan 91 21:30:53 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Lines: 40


Hello,

I run A/UX 2.0 from an external Quantum 120Mb hard disk and I am
encountering SCSI timeouts (about 6 per day) from this drive. Can anyone out
there give me a clue as to *why* this is happening?

My / and /usr partitions are on the external, which has SCSI id 4; the
internal houses the /users partition. Every now and then the Mac (a 5Mb
IIcx) freezes for 10 seconds during which the external drive's access light
is on for 5 seconds and then off for the next 5. Finally an error message:

		Disk write c4d0s0 Error: SCSI timeout
		Logical block 808, physical blocks 78038-78045
		Disk write c4d0s0 retry #2 successful

appears at the console and processing continues as normal. The drive number
varies (often it is c4d0s2, i.e. /usr; or c4d0s1, i.e. swap), as do the
logical and physical block numbers. However, the retry count is always 2 and
the problem is always a write error. The error does not perturb A/UX (apart
from the delay), but under the Finder some Mac applications quit immediately
on receipt of the error.

The same drive has been used under MacOS for some 4 months previously with
no ill effects or errors. A thorough going over with SCSI Evaluator reveals
no fault - has anyone else encountered this problem? Any ideas?

Grateful for any help,

Jan.

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FROM : Jan Andrew Purchase          | Snail:     Room 208, PhD Lab.,
                                    |            Computer Science Dept.,
JANET   : J.Purchase@uk.ac.ucl.cs   |		 University College,
ARPANET : J.Purchase@cs.ucl.ac.uk   |		 London, UK.
UUCP	: {... ukc!}ucl.cs!purchase |
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      (these are my views, and are not necessarily those of UCL)
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