Calling Customer Service for bad sectors

["William M. York" <York@chuck-jones.ila-west.dialnet.symbolics.com>]

	Date: Sun, 20 Nov 88 10:55 PST
	From: York@Chuck-Jones.ILA-West.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (William M. York)

	    From: johny%TECHUNIX.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Johny Srouji)

	    I have a 3670 Symbolics machine. I have a problem with my disk (hard
	    ones)

	How important is the data on the disk.  Is your LMFS stored there?  Have
	you been doing regular backups?  It is probably easiest to turn the
	problem over to customer service.  They will probably reformat and/or
	replace the disk and you can then reload the world load and restore your
	LMFS from backup tapes.

    Date: Sun, 20 Nov 88 14:11:25 CST
    From: forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

    This is the kind of answer I find depressing when I consider the future
    of Symbolics.  Every other computer I own, from PC's to workstations, has
    included in the system software utilities for fixing bad sectors, reformatting
    disks, etc.  Not Symbolics.  Oh, no.  Instead, I am supposed to pay
    $2K minimum to have someone from Symbolics drive into town (if, indeed,
    there is still Symbolics service personnel within driving distance after
    the layoffs) and do it for me.  This is ridiculous.  

    Why doesn't Symbolics make available to its customers such utilities?

Most of these utilities are avaiable.  The FEP provides a Disk Format
command.  Each machine comes with an Initial File System (IFS) tape that
you can use to create a standard FEP directory structure after
reformatting.  The tools in sys:n-fep;fix-fep-block.lisp can splice out
bad blocks and generally repair things.  Of course, there is not much
documentation for the do-it-yourself disk repairer, but hackers can make
do.

My point is that it is probably quicker, less painful, and quite
possibly cheaper for Mr. Srouji to have customer service take care of
the problem.  If he is on contract and he has recent LMFS backup tapes,
why suffer needlessly?

    Date: Sun, 20 Nov 88 17:20 EST
    From: Robert W. Kerns <RWK@F.ILA.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM>

    Reformatting and/or replacing any disk with a LMFS on it should be the
    absolute last resort, short of punting the data.  Hopefully the
    Symbolics FS people know this.  and will do what they can to avoid
    this course of action.  However, it does sound like the FEP believes the
    drive has formatting problems.

Again, based on the apparent seriousness of the problem, it is probably
a lot easier to punt and start over from scratch *IF* the LMFS has been
backed up on a regular basis.  I was not advocating indescriminate
reformatting, but I was warning him that turning the problem over to
customer service will probably result in a new and/or reformatted disk,
thereby losing all hope of recovering the information.