News Group Posts

panic from bad hard drive

From: Bill Walker <bw@cs4.ecok.edu>
Subject: Re: Panic trap solved
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 18:40:30 GMT

This reports that we seem to have found a solution to frequent and
unexplained "panic trap" messages on our SCO OSR 5.0.5 machines.

I had posted earlier to this newsgroup seeking advice, and I received
plenty, but to no avail.

We have a rather large bank of disk drives.  One partition on one
of the drives had failed, and we had simply "unmounted" that partition
and not used it.  Three other partitions on the same drive worked
flawlessly, but we still kept them all unmounted.  Eventually, we
reformatted the drive altogether, and put it back into service, but
it still seemed to have some "funny" behavior.  fsck would report
an occasional problem on the partition that had given the errors
in the first place.  "fsck -ofull -y" usually seemed to "fix it".

When we physically removed the disk drive from the cabinet, the panic
traps went away, and have not returned.  (Weeks ago, now.)

Moral:  It's not always where you think, and in spite of all reason,
"bad vibes" come from broken hardware.

73 de Bill W5GFE

Comments?

Jump to Comments

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.

We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.