[8403] in Hotline Meeting
Navigator's broken floppy drive....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael L Barrow)
Wed Apr 1 00:05:59 1992
To: hotline@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: carla@Athena.MIT.EDU, dcns-cluster@Athena.MIT.EDU, cprivate@Athena.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: mlbarrow@mit.edu
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 92 00:05:25 EST
From: Michael L Barrow <mlbarrow@Athena.MIT.EDU>
On Monday, William Chuang reported that the floppy drive on one of the
On Duty workstations in 11-115 was not working properly:
/***** hector:hotline / priam!jjmorey / 8:43 am Mar 31, 1992*/
From wchuang@Athena.MIT.EDU Mon Mar 30 21:49:11 1992
From: wchuang@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 92 21:49:02 -0500
To: hotline@Athena.MIT.EDU, cprivate@Athena.MIT.EDU
Subject: Navigator's disk drive
Navigator's disk drive is pretty messed up. Sticking in a formatted
floppy and trying to do a dosread from it will hang it -- you can move
the mouse around, but your clock will stop, etc. The disk light goes
on, and it spins... but you can only get things to work again if you
reboot or hit Control-c about 50 times and poke at the drive.
-William
Today, he received the following reply:
William-
Dosread does not work consistantly on the Vax3100's, this is also not
supported by Athena. You could try another Vax3100 untill you find
one that it works on consistantly.
3-31-92
JJ
/* ---------- */
I am a bit confused by this response since it is my understanding that
this command _is_ supported by Athena since it is in the release, there
is a stock answer on it, and there is no documentation -- at least to my
knowledge -- stating otherwise.
Furthermore, the option to "try another machine" doesn't work for us
since we only have 2 VS3100s. I understand that the machines in the
public clusters receive a lot of abuse and are exposed to more dust so
the best advice in most cases is to use another machine. This advice
should not hold true for Navigator since it is a private workstation
that Consulting relies on in order to provide support. I would
appreciate it if a Field Service Engineer or Ops Staff could come and
check it for hardware problems since it is covered under a DEC service
contract.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me.
Thanks,
mlb
