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Did my friend fried a SCSI disk?

agustinchernitsky

Hello friends,

Something strange happened today... A friend of mine bought two "used" SCSI drives, 18 GB each U320 for his 2850 Dell server. Hr tested the drives before taking them and they were OK...

He installed the drives in the server... booted up.. and accessed the SCSI controller BIOS. The drives were detected normally. Then he told me he "Formatted on drive using the SCSI controller BIOS utility" and because it took so long, he cancelled the operation.

From that point onwards, the disk was detected but the SCSI controlle BIOS returned an error stating "Unexpected SCSI command Failed"... the disk can't be formatted or detected by Windows.

Any ideas? Did he fried it?

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Comments

supertechCETma

in a word... yes.

JDMurray

How exactly did your friend "cancel the operation?" And were there any error messages immediately indicated by the BIOS after the operation was canceled?

Slowhand

jdmurray wrote:

How exactly did your friend "cancel the operation?" And were there any error messages immediately indicated by the BIOS after the operation was canceled?

I was thinking the same thing. If the machine was simply restarted or a hard shutdown was performed in the middle of the formatting operation, the drive could very well be FUBAR'ed.

mikej412

The SCSI bios Format taketh -- maybe it can giveth back too. Before you toss it in the fried electronic recycling bin, you may want to give the SCSI Controller (or another controller on another machine if this server is a production server) a chance to verify and/or format it -- this time to completition (or over a long weekend before you give up on it).

Slowhand

mikej412 wrote:

The SCSI bios Format taketh -- maybe it can giveth back too.

I am going to print that out on a poster and have our resident system builder post it in his lab.

supertechCETma

Some side effects of doing a LLF: If a power failure occurs while a LLF is in progress, the drive may be left in an unusable state, requiring return to the manufacturer for repair. It is safest to do this on a system with a UPS. This can also happen if you interrupt the LLF before it finishes.

agustinchernitsky

jdmurray wrote:

How exactly did your friend "cancel the operation?" And were there any error messages immediately indicated by the BIOS after the operation was canceled?

in his words: "it was taking too long... so I did a reset"

agustinchernitsky

mikej412 wrote:

The SCSI bios Format taketh -- maybe it can giveth back too. Before you toss it in the fried electronic recycling bin, you may want to give the SCSI Controller (or another controller on another machine if this server is a production server) a chance to verify and/or format it -- this time to completition (or over a long weekend before you give up on it).

Well Mike, I did suggest him to place the drive in another server with another RAID controller... same thing... I think the BIOS format stayed with the Taketh part

JDMurray

Before your friend scraps the drive, have him email Gibson Research (support2006@grc.com) with a complete description of the problem and the events that lead to it, and ask if their SpinRite utility can possibly fix it. SpinRite does support SCSI drives, but it may not be able to repair a drive that isn't properly recognized by the SCSI controller. It's worth an email to ask.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

agustinchernitsky

Thanks JD!

I believe he ordered a new one... But I will pass him the e-mail. I guessed he learnt the lesson by now