Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!husc6!m2c!chansw!chan
From: chan@chansw.UUCP (Jerry H. Chan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Hard drive problem
Keywords: Seagate, boot, disk
Message-ID: <1427@chansw.UUCP>
Date: 20 Feb 90 01:22:17 GMT
References: <267@menno.UUCP>
Organization: Chan SmartWare Computers, Worcester, MA
Lines: 47

In article <267@menno.UUCP>, bob@menno.UUCP (Robert Schwartz) writes:
> ...
> Lately about half of our machines
> have been exhibiting unusual behavior:  they have lost their ability to
> boot.  We've run them for months without problems and now some refuse to
> ...
> So my questions are these:  what is wrong?  have we been victimized by a
> virus of some sort?  Or should we just live with it and pay our
> employees more?

I have seen a disportionate number of SEAGATES exhibit this problem, and for
that reason do not use SEAGATES in my systems anymore.  I believe that the
problem is thermal sensitivity.  If you powerdown your systems in the
evenings, this problem usually manifests itself by an unreadable cylinder
0 (guess where the boot info is kept on your disk?) for the first 5 or so
minutes until the disk warms up.  This problem was pseudo-confirmed by the
tech support person I deal with at my distributorship, in particular, with
ST225's and ST251's (although I have seen at least one ST4096 exhibit this
problems too).

The fix (IMHO):

Option A: If your drives are still under warranty, swap them out under warranty
   and keep your eye on the new critters; unfortunately, it sometimes takes up
   to several months (in my experience) for this problem to rear its ugly head.

Option B: Low-level format -- sometimes this will help for a while, but from
   experience, the problem will probably come back to haunt you.  (Low
   level format with DEBUG, g=c800:5, Disk Manager, Speedstor, etc.)

Option C: Keep your machines powered on 24 hours a day, for obvious reasons.

To be fair, I have seen identical problems with several Miniscribe's 20M 40msec
3.5" drives, as well as with a Connors (in my laptop).  My fix for these
have been warranty swaps. I consider this to be an industry-wide engineering
challenge for all disk manufacturers; in my opinion, Seagate hasn't fared too
well in this challenge.

Having seen my share of disk failures, I don't believe that the disk
manufacturers have quite the "handle" on the technology as they would like
us to believe -- there's still a fair amount of "black magic" to get these
things to work.
-- 
Jerry Chan 508-853-0747, Fax 508-853-2262  |"My views necessarily reflect the
Chan Smart!Ware Computer Services & Prods  | views of the Company because
Worcester, MA 01606                        | I *am* the Company." :-)
{bu.edu,husc6}!m2c!chansw!chan             \---------------------------------