Hi,
Apologies that my first post to this list for a while is one requesting
assistance, but my unjustified faith in hard drive technology has bitten
me... The Seagate drive in my VAXstation 4000/90 (running OpenVMS 7.3)
failed recently and it hadn't been backed up for quite a while. We had a
power surge which tripped the main circuit breaker, and when I reset the
breaker and turned the box back on the drive failed to spin up. The
drive is recognized by the firmware, except that the capacity column
shows ... instead of a figure. An LED on the controller circuit board
lights a couple of times reinforcing that the drive electronics are
talking across the SCSI bus, but as I say the drive refuses to spin up.
The box was running a website dedicated to HECNet (it was at
http://www.hecnet.eu) using the WASD webserver and was able to report on
issues with the network and current HECnet nodes.
My (limited) diagnostic skills would point towards a drive motor
controller failure, or less likely sticking heads. Given that the drive
has been powered down and up on a number of occasions without issue I'm
thinking it is probably a controller failure rather than a head problem,
but I'm open to alternative opinions.
Does anyone have a Seagate ST39173N drive they would be prepared to part
with for a reasonable amount of money? At the moment the only drives I
can find are in the region of $150 which is more than I can comfortably
part with on the off chance that swapping the controller board might
give the drive new life.
Many thanks for the help.
Mark.