sick disk

["Richard M. Cohen" <Cohen@MCC.COM>]

    Date: Wed, 14 Sep 88 07:05 PDT
    From: Spock@SAMSON.CADR.DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM (Spock)

	Date: Tue, 13 Sep 88 16:04:25 CDT
	From: walls%ssl.span@Fedex.Msfc.Nasa.Gov

	Greetings!  I wonder if someone could help me.  My 3620 has gone belly
	up, and has been that way for a while.  At power on, the FEP prompt comes
	up fine, and the disk makes its normal(?) awful noises.  When I try to do
	a HELLO, though, the machine comes back with a "Drive not ready during unit
	select" and goes no further.  This is on a 3620 with two Maxor XT-2190
	190 MB drives and a tape drive.

	Call maintenance, right?  Well, due to an administrative error, our maint-
	enance contract has lapsed.
	...
	Also, what about installing my own second drive in my single drive 3620.
	Are such user mods a serious no no?  That machine is still under maintenance.

    Good luck!  I've been down this road before and symbolics doesn't let
    out their disk formatting software (unless they've drastically changed
    policy recently).  So, symbolics users have to pay double for their
    disks.  symbolics ought to get out of the hardware business.

A while ago we looked into several options for installing new disks.  My
memory may be faulty, and Symbolics Field Service pricing and policies
may have changed.  At that time Symbolics Field Service would install a
user-purchased disk for about $1000 - $1500 (from boxed drive to running
system).  If you installed it yourself, they would write an IFS tape
(from the bad blocks list) for about $500.  They also said (at that
time) that they would accept maintenance contracts on disks that had
been purchased through 3rd party vendors, as long as the hardware was
something they standardly supported.  (I.e., After inspection they would
maintain a user-installed disk on a LISPM in the same manner they would
had the disk been purchased from and installed by Symbolics.)