[H-GEN] Problem with Irix disc drive / file system.

[Ewan Edwards]

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Good morning all,

I have a problem with a drive in a SGI Indigo2 that I haven't been able to 
fix and don't know what else I can do.  It goes a bit like this.

When powered on the machine goes through the usual preliminary checks without 
problems.  When it starts to load the OS it goes into an infinite loop 
reporting a media I/O CRC error.  If I run the maintenance mode diagnostics 
before allowing it to boot, there are no problems reported with any of the 
hardware.  (The diagnostics don't look at file systems etc. on disc.)

I have put the drive into another machine having changed its SCSI ID, and 
rebooted.  The new machine OS (also Irix) recognises the disc and can read 
the partition table.  It can also identify the file system (EFS in this case) 
and knows how much available space exists.  

When I try to run fsck on the partition, it starts the first pass checking 
blocks but doesn't get very far before encountering a media I/O error.  After 
retrying the particular block a number of times, fsck stops to ask if it 
should continue or stop.  If asked to continue - the same problem.

If I try to mount the partition, get a similar infinite loop as when trying 
to boot.

At this point I am thinking that maybe there is an area of the disc surface 
that has become defective.  My main problem is that I don't know enough about 
Irix or SGI systems to know how to proceed from here, or, if there are any 
utilities etc. that I might be able to use to salvage the file system and/or 
any data off the disc.

Insert plaintive cry for help here.  :-)


---
Ewan Edwards BE MIEAust CPEng
Development Support Engineer
Mincom
Ewan.Edwards at mincom.com
Telephone: +61 (0) 7 3303 3554
Facsimile: +61 (0) 7 3303 3470
http://www.mincom.com
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