Proceedable Disk Errors

[toni@l4.zfe.siemens.de (Anton Beschta)]

Hi,

I'm sometimes working on an ancient 3600 running Genera 8.1 and there
are some problems with its disks. The machine halts very often with a
proceedable disk search error, especially while garbage collection :-(
Mapping the address back on the device reveals that the error occurs
always on a particular disk, but on different surfaces and tracks
(paging or world load files, never the LMFS).

Since this machine is still used as a fileserver it would be nice to
know whether we have to expect a crash in the near future. Is there any
other way to improve the current situation without replacing the disk
drive?

It would also be a help if we were able to bring up the machine
again without cold booting.
If the machine halts with the above mentioned error while not running
the GC a warm boot does the job. But if the error occurs while
GCing a warm boot results in 

Error: Searched past region-origin while searching for the header of
       <some octal address>.

The only proceed option is to exit the initialization of Genera. Is it
possible to fix the memory organization (more or less) in order to get
the machine warm booted?

Any experiences/suggestions/hints are appreciated,

 Toni Beschta