From: ejh@khonshu.colorado.edu (Edward J. Hartnett)
Subject: Problems traveling with my Sun IPC
Summary: This is a summary of some problems I encountered while traveling
Organization: Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 18:25:08 GMT

Recently I took a 5-week trip to the Portuguese island of Santa Maria,
one of the Azores islands smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic. It
was all part of a meteorological project called ASTEX. There were 50
to 70 scientists on this island for the month of June, maybe more,
with all kinds of equipment and computers, much of which was shipped
in the charter flight we were on.

We took our Sun IPC (without the monitor - I used a laptop on ttya as
the console), including our exabyte 8200 drive, our Central Data SCSI
terminal server, our 1.3Gbyte drive, and tons of cabels, etc.
Everything but the drive we shipped in a special case we had
purchased, which is specifically designed to shipping delicate
equipment, and filled with foam pads that you can cut and layer such
that you get an exact fit for your equipment. The disk drive (which
was also our boot drive - no internal drive in this machine) I carried
with me as carry-on luggage, in a heavily padded soft case.

Unfortunately I dropped the drive at one point, about three feet (it
fell of the baggage cart). When we got to Santa Maria I set it all up,
but the drive had a number of problems. The point of posting this is
to warn future travelers, and hopefully to get some understanding of
exactly what happened to my machine. Here's a lit of the problems. Any
thoughts would be appreciated. Please email, and after a while I'll
post a summary.

1 - We repeatedly experienced a problem getting the disk to spin up.
I had this problem here twice before I left my office. The problem was
that the disk power would go on, but the disk wouldn't start spinning.
(When it does start, it sounds like a miniature jet taking off - quite
noticable). Most times (say 28 out of 30) it was no problem, it would
take a little while, maybe 20 seconds, then spin up. But twice, after
waiting a minute or two, I had to turned it off and try again. This
was not a major annoyance. But, on Santa Maria, sometimes it took 50
or 60 retries before it powered up again! We dreaded turing it off,
but sometimes we absolutely had to, or the power would go off (we had
a UPS but it wasn't always connected, because I suspected it was
causing problems). All of this was on 220 volts, 50 Hz. (Both when it
was plugged into the wall and into the UPS, which was made to put out
European voltages. Towards the end of the project we had to move our
computer setup, and I greatly feared we would never get that disk
spinning again. But in the new location, there was an American voltage
UPS, and it started up no problem. While connected to that power
supply we powered off and back on three times, and each time it spun
up immediately. Since we've gotten back it's also worked the first try
every time. Any comments?

2 - When we arrived the boot sectors were somehow damaged or
scrambled. It wouldn't boot. I had to take it to another machine,
reformat the drive, and reinstall everything. This was a common
problem that happened to at least two other Suns that were there. One
more note, when I first formated the disk (in my office, before we
left for Santa Maria), there were 0 defects in the defect list. But
when I reformatted it, and it said it needed a defect list, I executed
the "get the manufacturers defect list" and there were about 47
defects listed. What could cuase this kind of problem?

3 - On several occasions I got an electrical shock from the SCSI
connectors in the back. We probably had massive ground loops, could
that explain it? Also I was plugging things in and out of the SCSI bus
with the power still on. I know this is supposed to be a big no no,
but has anyone ever experienced problems because of it? Why would it
cause a problem anyway?

4 - For a while we were running our exabyte on 50Hz power (converted
to 120V). Is this a problem for the motors inside? Another group
brought a massive frequency shifter to get 60Hz power for their
exabytes, so I eventually tapped into that. But I had already used the
exabyte drive many times without any apparent prolems. Has anyone out
there burned out an exabyte drive on 50Hz?

That's it, I guess. I'm looking foreward to having some light shed on
these mysterious problems.

			Ed Hartnett