Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!tuegate.tue.nl!rc6.urc.tue.nl!rwa.urc.tue.nl!rcbarn From: rcbarn@rwa.urc.tue.nl (Raymond Nijssen) Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386 Subject: Re: ISC 3.2/harddisk & floppy problems Message-ID: Date: 19 Jun 91 08:03:33 GMT References: <1991Jun10.214243.7594@abqhh.hanse.de> <113@odiehh.hanse.de> <1991Jun19.041521.12306@rand.org> Sender: news@rc6.urc.tue.nl Reply-To: rcbarn@urc.tue.nl Lines: 38 edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall) writes: >In article rcbarn@urc.tue.nl writes: >>marzusch@odiehh.hanse.de (Ralph-Diether Marzusch) writes: >>> If you connect two (!) hard disk drives to one (ore even two) `standard' >>> AT type hard disk controller (i.e. MFM, RLL or ESDI drives) you may >>> experience a `hanging' disk controller (making any further disk accesses >>> impossible which possibly destroys one or more file systems) when both >>> disks are accessed concurrently >It might be. I've had infrequent but persistant lockup problems with >ISC and a WD1006SR2 and a *SINGLE* disk. Although does not sound like the problem the original poster addressed, I'm very interested whether your controller has a chip with 'PROTO' on it, as I've never heard of this problem. Could you please have a look? >The clincher is that the lockup problem can happen with just a single disk. >As you state, there is a relatively simple fix for the overlapping >seek problem--simply disable overlapping seeks. I wish that the >solution for the lockup problem were so simple. Well, it worked perfectly for me. I never experienced the second kind of lockups, even when I was running X on my system with just 4Mb, swap partitions on both disks and huge, almost continuous swapping. This is why I still believe that the solution for the lockup problem is so simple. (For you info: without this fix, the system would crash within two or three minutes after having started X). I now have another WD1006Svr2 (whithout the infamous 'PROTO' message) for some months, overlapped-seeks re-enabled, and the system has never paniced ever since. -Raymond -- | Raymond X.T. Nijssen | Eindhoven Univ. of Technology | | raymond@es.ele.tue.nl | EH 7.13, PO 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands | | "Don't put that on the wall in a tax-payer supported museum!" Pat Buchanan |