From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: update on inst problem -- weirder and weirder (LONG)
Date: 8 Apr 92 04:20:46 GMT
Article-I.D.: zuni.j97cfr4
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA

In <1992Apr7.114115.24319@helios.physics.utoronto.ca> sysmark@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Mark Bartelt) writes:

| Last week I posted a description of a problem with installation
| of the original EOE 4.0 software onto a virgin disk on an Indigo,
| installing from a remote CD connected to a 4D/25.  (Dave Olson
| pointed out that we shouldn't even be *using* that 4.0 CD, since
| it's been superseded by 4.0.1, which is quite true.  Nevertheless,
| I'd like to pursue this problem anyway, since I believe that it's
| orthogonal to any questions related to release versions, and may
| be symptomatic of some other problem(s).)
| 
| Here's the problem as I described it last week:
| 
| (1)  If the CD reader is directly attached to the Indigo, there
| are no problems.  The installation always succeeds.
| 
| (2)  If the CD reader is attached to the 4D/25, attempts to do
| the installation from the remote CD-ROM fail ...
| 
|  Unexpected EOF at distribution data for usr/lib/images/cedit.icon
|  inst:  can't install usr/lib/images/cedit.icon
| 
| ... and, upon exiting inst's interrupt/error menu, you're told ...
| 
|  dd: read error: I/O error
|  280+0 records in
|  280+0 records out
| 
| The failure point is always the same, making it unlikely that the
| problems are related to network errors (which would likely exhibit
| some randomness).
| 
| After I posted last week's article, it occurred to me that perhaps
| I should take a look at SYSLOG on the 4D/25.  Sure enough, for each
| unsuccessful attempt to install IRIX onto the Indigo from the 4D/25's
| CD reader, I find the following SYSLOG message (here chopped into two
| pieces for readability):
| 
|  unix: dks0d4s7 (/CDROM): Media error: Unrecovered data block read error,
| 	ASQ=0x6,. Block #160096 (195072).

ASQ is the Additional Sense Qualifier.  So a read command (0x28) is
failing, and request sense is returning sense key 3 (Media error), 
Additional Sense Code 0x11 (Unrecovered ...), and ASQ of 6.  The ASQ
is supposed to provide addtional information.  SCSI 2 says that 
0x11/0x6 means "CIRC Unrecovered Error".  I can't lay my hands on 
my CD-ROm manual at the moment, but I suspect it would say the same,
since it is supposed to be SCSI 2 compliant.

It boils down to: you have a bad CD.  From the other symptoms you
describe, it is just barely possible that it is seek related, in
which case the lens on the laser could be dirty, or the head assembly
may not be aligned correctly.  This is the first case like this I've
seen, but we haven't had the CD's out there for too long.  It would
be interesting to run fx in butterfly mode (readonly, of course)
on the CD to see what turns up.  Alternatively, just request that
TAC send you a new CD, and see what happens.
--
Let no one tell me that silence gives consent,  |   Dave Olson
because whoever is silent dissents.             |   Silicon Graphics, Inc.
    Maria Isabel Barreno                        |   olson@sgi.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi