Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!mit-amt!mjkobb
From: mjkobb@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael J Kobb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: LaCie Cirrus 105 bellies up
Summary: HELP!!!
Message-ID: <1671@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 20 Feb 90 23:37:59 GMT
Reply-To: mjkobb@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Michael J Kobb)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 51

Well, this is truly odd.  Last night around 2:00 my LaCie Cirrus 105 external
drive dropped dead for about ten minutes.  The sequence of events leading up
to this happening, and after:

1.)  I took the drive in to work with me, and hooked it up to a MacII with an
internal 80Mb drive (also a Cirrus, I think).  My drive would not spin up if
the Mac II was powered off, and I had trouble getting it to mount.  I got the
message "SCSI bus is not responding" at least once.  After awhile, it worked
fine.  (There had been absolutely no trouble with this drive before this
time).

2.)  I brought the drive back home, hooked it up, and booted.  I got the
message "The Finder on this startup disk is damaged.  The Installer can be
used to repair it".  After that, the drive totally refused to come up.  It
didn't even show up on the SCSI bus (looking with SCSI Tools after booting
from a floppy).  Again, this problem went away after multiple power cycles,
and switching the SCSI cable back and forth between the jacks.

3.)  Last night around 2:00, I was uploading files to America Online, and the
upload died in mid stream; apparently the Mac couldn't read from the drive any
more.  I rebooted successfully, finished the uploads, then ran LaCie's
SilverLining diagnostic software.  The "Short Tests" returned several thousand
errors, and I canceled them (no audible drive action during this time).  When
I tried "Full Read/Write tests" I was greeted by the lovely sound of my drive
motor spinning down.  10 minutes of panic ensued, since the drive was not
recently backed up (I had just written about 10 meg to it when I took it into
work; one-copy-only material).  I booted off of floppy, and SCSI Tools showed
two SCSI devices: #7 (the mac) and #1.  I don't have a SCSI #1.  I have a #5
(the LaCie), but it wasn't talking.  After multiple power cycles, and rotating
the case of the drive it around in my hands (powered off, obviously) in case
it was suffering stiction, it spun up.  I immediately backed it up and the
went to bed (by then it was 5:00 am).

4.)  I booted this morning without incident, and ran the SilverLining tests
without incident.

5.)  I called LaCie Tech Support, and they said that they hadn't heard this
set of symptoms before.  He said he would discourage me from sending the drive
in, since if they couldn't reproduce the error, I'd be screwed out of a few
weeks use of the drive.  He suggested frequent backups and pious living,
basically, and wait until it fails more permanently, or just works fine from
now on.

Has anybody ever seen such a thing before?  It was really odd to me that the
drive would just spontaneously spin down and then put up an erroneous address
on the bus.  It sounds to me like the SCSI controller in the drive has dropped
dead.  Anybody concur?  Or am I seeing stiction?

Thanks for any help/advice you can give me!

--Mike