> On Thu, Aug 31 2000 at 13:34:20 +0100, Tim Walls wrote:
>> If it's not a known software bug, I'm looking to change the disk
>> (an IBM 6GB SCSI) - I managed to get a tape backup of everything
>> last night, thank God (time to buy my own tape drive methinks.)
> There's not much room in a sparc classic and only very little airflow around
> the harddisk - I bet heat was the problem.
> 
> I think some IBM harddiscs have a feature that they simply switch off when
> they
> think they got too hot. At least I noticed that with a 6GB IDE disc mounted
> in a Acorn RISC PC (Not much airflow in a RISC PC either):
> You hear a "clonk" and then it's dead.  This happened a few times around
> two years ago - the harddisc still runs fine (with better cooling now.)

Sounds like exactly the same symptom (the 'clonk' was a distinctly less than
happy sound to hear coming from your computer...)

Heat definitely sounds plausible.  The weather had a couple of days where it
wanted to pretend we really were going to have a summer this year, and the
machine isn't in the best ventilated place you could find.

> Because of that experience most harddisks I run 24/7 have additional cooling
> fans now :-)

I shall have a dig around in the classic and see if there is some way of
mounting a fan in the floppy bay which will pull a bit more air over
the hard drive...

Many thanks for the help,
Tim.


(On a positive note, Hurrah for LFS!  First time it has been tested in a
 failure mode in anger by me, and it recovered with consummate grace ;=)

-- 
Tim Walls