Title: Sick Optical Disk
Post by: pentium on September 17, 2015, 04:12:49 PM
Post by: pentium on September 17, 2015, 04:12:49 PM
So I've gone through my 20something OD cartridges to image them and I have one left in the pile and oh man is it unhappy.
Cosmetically it's immaculate. No damage to the case and no contamination inside either. No signs that was ever abused.
If you feed it to the cube and try to boot from it...
...now I know it probably was not bootable but only this cartridge throws those ECC errors, plus the drive whines for a few moments.
Now I boot the machine up and again, noting that during the boot it becomes aware that something is injected but specifies no label...
...and once it reaches the workspace it says it's unreadable which I'm doubtful about that but I can't even dd the drive directly. I simply can't get at the data.
To verify it's not the drive I eject the cartridge and feed it another one. Yeah, reads it fine. I could even get it to dd. Now eject it and feed it the other cartridge again and try to-
boom.
NeXTSTEP and the machine go down in flames so badly that a warm reboot fails. You have to power the machine off and then back on again before you can even boot from the internal SCSI disk.
It is replicable as well. You simply cannot feed the machine this cartridge AT ALL once it's successfully mounted another optical disk or else it will panic. I'm stumped on this one here.
Cosmetically it's immaculate. No damage to the case and no contamination inside either. No signs that was ever abused.
If you feed it to the cube and try to boot from it...
...now I know it probably was not bootable but only this cartridge throws those ECC errors, plus the drive whines for a few moments.
Now I boot the machine up and again, noting that during the boot it becomes aware that something is injected but specifies no label...
...and once it reaches the workspace it says it's unreadable which I'm doubtful about that but I can't even dd the drive directly. I simply can't get at the data.
To verify it's not the drive I eject the cartridge and feed it another one. Yeah, reads it fine. I could even get it to dd. Now eject it and feed it the other cartridge again and try to-
boom.
NeXTSTEP and the machine go down in flames so badly that a warm reboot fails. You have to power the machine off and then back on again before you can even boot from the internal SCSI disk.
It is replicable as well. You simply cannot feed the machine this cartridge AT ALL once it's successfully mounted another optical disk or else it will panic. I'm stumped on this one here.
Title: Sick Optical Disk
Post by: barcher174 on September 17, 2015, 06:43:06 PM
Post by: barcher174 on September 17, 2015, 06:43:06 PM
Before inserting use:
fsck /dev/rod0a
This bypasses mounting to the workspace. See if the errors can be corrected.
fsck /dev/rod0a
This bypasses mounting to the workspace. See if the errors can be corrected.
Title: Sick Optical Disk
Post by: pentium on September 18, 2015, 08:19:42 AM
Post by: pentium on September 18, 2015, 08:19:42 AM
rod0a apparently has no disk label and does nothing. For kicks I tried rod1a and all that does is ejects the disk.
Title: Sick Optical Disk
Post by: reagan9000 on January 06, 2016, 08:40:38 PM
Post by: reagan9000 on January 06, 2016, 08:40:38 PM
I'm impressed that you still have a working OD drive. I have many disks probably filled with interesting stuff but both my drives burned out long ago...
Title: Sick Optical Disk
Post by: pentium on January 06, 2016, 09:59:25 PM
Post by: pentium on January 06, 2016, 09:59:25 PM
Welcome to the forum
We got a whole other thread here that was dedicated to figuring out what was killing the drives and how to repair them. At this point we have pretty much would up our efforts as we are now able to successfully repair drives and return them to a useable status. Myself included, there's a few here on the forum that also do cartridge archival for those who wish to finally get backup copies of their long inaccessible data.
We got a whole other thread here that was dedicated to figuring out what was killing the drives and how to repair them. At this point we have pretty much would up our efforts as we are now able to successfully repair drives and return them to a useable status. Myself included, there's a few here on the forum that also do cartridge archival for those who wish to finally get backup copies of their long inaccessible data.
Title: Sick Optical Disk
Post by: reagan9000 on January 10, 2016, 02:55:32 PM
Post by: reagan9000 on January 10, 2016, 02:55:32 PM
Thanks for pointing me to the fascinating OD repair thread - what great work! I might take you up on archiving a cartridge or two of mine if I fail to recover my drives.
Tim
Tim
Title: Sick Optical Disk
Post by: gtnicol on January 10, 2016, 09:02:59 PM
Post by: gtnicol on January 10, 2016, 09:02:59 PM
I'm always happy to archive disks for the price of shipping (i.e. you pay the shipping, I'll do the rest. :D )