Any hope for this Quantum Hard drive from an old Indy?
I grabbed an Indy XZ out of my storage in California over the holiday. Still looks pretty new! Removed the hard drive in case I had to check the well packed Indy box, wrapped it in foam and put it safely in my laptop bag, but managed to get the largeish box into an overhead bin (I checked the exact size limits!!), so thankfully the long preserved Indy was never thrown around and dropped. I was more worried about the Nidec power supply, but that seems fine. Other the drive the thing just worked, no reseating anything. Graphics comes up and I can get into the PROM monitor no problem. BUT it doesn't boot and the drive doesn't give the noises I expect from an old SCSI drive. This machine has been untouched since 2008. 14 years! In non climate controlled northern California heat,
The drive is newer than the Indy for sure. It has a 68 pin interface and a 68 to 50 pin converter. SCSI being SCSI perhaps me messing with the cable and the very tight fitting converter could be problematic? But I fear the drive just isn't initializing, heads are not tracking, something like that. It spins up ok, but never makes any head searching, reading noises. Just repeatedly cycles through some initial actions, same sound over and over, in sync with the same or similar errors in the PROM Monitor.
Quantum Viking II, 9.1GB, P/N PX09L011
Anyone got any rituals for reviving 25 year old SCSI drives??
Here's googles attempt at making text from a screenshot. Looks mostly right? We live in the future.
/hw/node/10/gio/hpc/scs1_ct ir/8/target/1/1un/8/disk/partition/8/block: retries ALERT: 1/0 error in filesystem ("/") meta-data dev 0x25 block 8x782e19 ("xlog_br ead")
WARNING: initial mount of root device /hw/node/10/g10/hpc/scs1_ct 1r/8/target/1/1 un/8/disk/partition/0/block failed with errno 5 WARNING: initial mount of root device /hw/node/10/gio/hpc/scs1_ct1r/8/target/1/1 un/8/disk/partition/0/block failed with errno 10117
(This post was last modified: 01-14-2022, 07:10 AM by Dylanear.)
RE: Any hope for this Quantum Hard drive from an old Indy?
I’m not a magician with these things but there may be something. If you’re about to toss the drive anyway:
1. Your disk isn’t dead because it’s ID is detected and reported on hinv. So it’s not a bad power diode or a basic HDD board issue.
2. You mentioned no noises from the heads? This is odd but maybe the basic issue. Your errors claim a single bad spot but that may not be true.
My thought is you either have a frozen/stuck head assembly (cannot move and therefore reinitializes early in boot up cycle) or you have an aged component that has affected your head amplifier circuit and the head cannot read, though that normally results in blindly scattering around the disk searching, yours does the opposite. It’s possible that if it didn’t cleanly shutdown 14 years ago you never parked your heads and the head assembly has been stopped over a single spot over the platters all this time.
Since it’s gone anyway, my suggestion would be to get it out of the Indy, double check that it’s jumpers aren’t making contact with metal or particles in the case and then do a basic dust cleaning, place it in a ziplock freezer bag and place it in your freezer for about 20-35 minutes. Then shortly after you remove it, give it a few taps with a small weight (like handle if the screw driver) on the rear/edge (side metal body above the scsi connector) trying to vibrate the head assembly a little. After the drive warms back up to nearly room temp ~60 F then try to run it and see if there is any difference.
Very small chance it will act differently after being gently cooled and knocked a little if the head assembly was frozen due to lubricant issues and not being placed on the head ramp.
But likely it’s gone, I do feel you on this. A small percentage of my old drives didn’t make the travel through time just sitting in their boxes. Getting 50 pin drives for the Indys is getting harder and harder. Which is why I guess why we’re getting more desperate for projects like SCSI2SD.
RE: Any hope for this Quantum Hard drive from an old Indy?
These Quantum drives were unreliable 20 years ago already. We had them at $WORK and I don't think any of them lasted more than a couple of years.
In general, the magnetic surface of the disk deteriorates after (many) years, resulting in media errors (hard I/O errors). Depending on the amount of media errors you may be able to force the drive to relocate them, but statistics say that if the drive finds more than a few simply booting there are probably lots of them in this disk.
You could low level format the disk but realistically this problem will return soon. This disk cannot be trusted any longer.
You have two options to get important data off:
1. Reinstall on a new system disk, and mount this one read-only as an option disk (ID #1) in the Indy and (fingers crossed) try to get files off it like that. Use something like GNU tar with 'conv=noerror' option so it doesn't abort on every read error.
2. Attempt repair: you'd have to boot into the standalone 'fx' utility and do a sequential read of the entire disk ('exercise > sequential > read only > from 0 to last sector'). Depending on the amount of bad sectors this may take a long time or fail entirely. If that works you're still stuck with a corrupted file system, so you'd need to xfs_check and repair that. Then try option #1. Or maybe even boot the system from it.
In either case, a disk with more than a handful of (correctable) media errors is junk and cannot be trusted. Spare yourself the frustration of spending a lot of time 'reconditioning' the disk with a low level format and repeated exercise passes, reinstalling everything, only to be back here 6 months from now.
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