Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!mcnc!ece-csc!ncrcae!ncr-sd!crash!mercurio From: mercurio@crash.CTS.COM (Phil Mercurio) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Close Call (Supra hard drive) Message-ID: <1385@crash.CTS.COM> Date: Tue, 14-Jul-87 15:05:05 EDT Article-I.D.: crash.1385 Posted: Tue Jul 14 15:05:05 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jul-87 01:57:33 EDT Organization: Crash TS, San Diego, CA Lines: 104 Keywords: Amiga hard disk Supra horror story [-] The following is a description of a close call I had with my 20 MB Supra hard disk on my Amiga. Warning: those of you with queasy stomachs, who lie awake at night worrying about how thoroughly you've backed up your hard disk, may find the material below distressing. I will attempt to alleviate the suspense, however, by revealing now that there is a happy ending. I should also mention that this is a tad long-winded. First, I should describe my hardware configuration. I have an old Amiga 1000 (acquired in Sept. '85) with a 20 MB Supradrive, an ASDG Minirack-C containing a 2 MB memory board plugged into the Supra controller's bus connector, and two external 3.5" drives (I have a long desk). All of what I describe occurred under Kickstart/Workbench 1.2. Last night, a friend and I were attempting to use Carolyn Scheppner's wonderful Cmd program to generate a printout that we would later send to an HP LaserJet. We were using my PagePrint1.3 program (available on DevDisk0005), which pretty-prints C source, and both the C file being printed and the printer image file being generated by Cmd were on my Supra hard disk (in different directories). PagePrint accesses the printer by Open()'ing "prt:" -- nothing magical going on here. After a few seconds of disk activity, the system froze (no Guru, just an unresponsive system). This didn't really bother us, since a screen grabbing program (Snatch, part of the commercially available WindowPrint) we'd been using earlier had been crashing repeatedly. We administer the Amiga/Vulcan nerve pinch (CTRL-Ah-Ah) and the system reboots. The first command in my Startup-Sequence is Supramount, as it should be. Upon the attempt to be mounted, the Supra starts blinking its busy light madly and continuously (it normally mounts in a second or so). This went on for several seconds, maybe a minute, before my friend and I realized something was not right. We rebooted again, and again the system seemed to get stuck attempting to mount the drive, blinking that little busy light until the cows come home (there aren't many cows here in San Diego -- I'm from Chicago, where cows have been known to cause trouble in the past). We attempted to boot off of a standard 1.2 Workbench disk (which does not attempt to mount the drive), and it came up fine. We edited the Startup-Sequence on my Workbench to remove just the Supramount command and booted from that disk -- no problems. Attempting to mount the drive again caused it to busy loop, again. We rebooted again, this time shutting the power to the entire system off before it knew what hit it. We waited about 10 seconds, then turned the power back on (I have everything plugged into one power strip so I can turn everything on at once -- this has been working fine for months). The system kickstarted properly, but again busy looped at the attempt to mount the drive. This was starting to look serious. Although I was reasonably well backed up, I had no desire to reformat and reconstruct an 85% full 20 MB disk. We had begun to suspect that the Supra was taking the initiative and attempting the reformatting for me. It was clearly time for action. We had one observation upon which we could base a decision: the pattern of blinking of the busy light demonstrated a small amount of variability -- signs of life! I consulted with my friend, Phil Cohen, whose wisdom I have sought out and deferred to since we worked together at UCSD 9 years ago. He'd been witness to this entire melodrama. We decided that the drive probably either knew what it was doing, or else all was lost anyway. We decided to attempt to mount the drive again, and this time, to wait until the busy light stopped blinking. So we waited, and we waited, and then we waited some more. If this were a 1940's black-and-white movie, the hands of an analog clock would be seen advancing at many times their normal rate, then the pages of a calendar would begin to tear off and flutter away. Seasons would change, the frost would melt, springtime birds would begin to chirp ... sorry, I get carried away. Seriously, I was too distraught to think to time anything, but I would estimate that the light blinked for over 5 minutes. Occasionally, it would pause for a second or two, then continue. And then, it stopped. I gingerly approached the keyboard to cd to dh0: -- it was there! I checked out a few important directories -- all there. I did an info -- the hard disk was as full as I had expected it to be. We toasted our good fortune and began backing up everything in sight. And I've had no problems since then. It ran flawlessly for several hours more that night, and is still humming along this morning. The damn thing actually healed itself. I have no idea why this occurred in the first place, and I have no desire to attempt to replicate it. I don't think the fault lies with either Scheppner's Cmd or with my PagePrint, but rather with the Supra itself. But then, it did fix itself, so it's hard to complain. All in all, I'm pleased with the Supra's performance, and would chalk this up to either good design on Supra's part or just plain dumb luck. Phil Mercurio DevWare, Inc. mercurio@pnet01.CTS.COM Usenet mercurio PeopleLink or GEnie