On Wed, 18 Dec 1996 11:09:10 -0600 
 "Marshall Midden" <m4@nts.umn.edu> wrote:

 > If a disk drive is set up with the jumper on that says don't spin up
 > with power-up, you can run into problems if the disk accidently loses
 > power and then gets powered back up.
 > 
 > The kernel doesn't power it back up.
 > 
 > After you pull the jumper and get it spinning, you can read the raw disk,
 > but a ccd (active file system) still can't access the drive... .

Hmm, ouch.  So... what errors did the scsi subsystem report when it was
unable to spin the disk back up?

Ok, so take a look at sdopen()... You'll note that the disk is sent
a START only on the _first_ open.  It may be possible to detect the
error condition, attempt to re-spin the disk, and requeue the
buffer...

 > reboot, and fsck -f did not show any problems whatsoever.

Well, that's good, at least :-)

 > Back to collecting tons of data, only losing 3 minutes worth of data.
 > (still a very fast reboot and fsck of a huge file system!)

Cool!

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                                Pager: 415.428.6939