Re: Vulcan HD goes haywire

[gdr@eddore.myrias.com (Devin Reade)]

In article <4lel7i$lbn@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>,
Sean McAfee <mcafee@verne.ifs.umich.edu> wrote:

[much snipped in this followup]

>I theorized that the disk had some bad blocks that somehow weren't being
>found by ProSel or the Finder.  I used AE's Partition Manager to make
>a new partition out of a chunk of the old first one (the one in which the
>errors always seemed to crop up), deactivated it, reformatted, and
>reinstalled.  Crash.  I shuffled around the location of the unused
>partition in the space that had been occupied by the old buggy partition.
>Crash.  Crash.  

Your new partition may contain bad blocks in critical sections.
See my comments below.

>Each crash might take anywhere from minutes to weeks to
>occur, but they always did.  The longest crash-free session ended this
>morning after weeks of good behavior, and I've finally had enough.

I had this problem about 4-5 years ago with my Vulcan (Gold) 40,
although I never had the partition names get changed.  I kept
getting disk errors that ProSEL-16 wouldn't touch.  I figured 
that the bad blocks were in the section of the HD used for the 
loader (blocks 0 and 1), the volume directory, and the bit map.

The way I got around the problem was to create an unused partition
at the start of the hard drive (which I have called /bad), then make
it inactive and boot from the second (or whatever) partition.  In
the case of my Vulcan, /bad is 1500k (3000 blocks).  The exact size
was done by bracketing, since I didn't want any of the first
critical blocks to include a bad block, either.

I haven't had any trouble with the drive since then.  Considering
that I bought my Vulcan circa 1988 and used it heavily since then,
it's not doing too bad since the MTBF for most HDs of that era was
about 5 years.

Hopefully this method will work for you.  If not, I don't
really have any other recommendations for your old drive.

>If (as I suspect) my HD is trashed on too deep a level to be repairable
>(at least by me), does anyone have any suggestions for the best and/or
>cheapest GS-compatible hard drive obtainable these days?

Your options are generally:
	1.  RAMFast w/ SCSI HD.  I've heard of people hacking
	    their old Vulcan case to house one SCSI drive.

	2.  Replace the Vulcan mech with another IDE drive.  If
	    you go this route, you will probably have to get
	    a Turbo-IDE card to control it as the Vulcan ROMs
	    are reputed to work with only certain makes/models/sizes
	    of IDE HDs.  You will also be limited to a drive
	    of ~240Meg, if you can find one anymore.

	3.  Various other weird things like Syquest, Floptical,
	    Zip drives, etc, that probably aren't suitable for
	    a limited budget.

-- 
	Devin Reade	gdr@eddore.myrias.ab.ca