Re: disk drives refuse to spin up after power down

Colin Williams wrote:
> 
> I remember this used to be a problem on as/400's in 1990, but is it
> still the case?
> 

"Sticktion" is what it was called. Could it be a problem? I beleive that
it could still be under the right circumstances:

1. You bought your drives during the problem.
2. You did not take your system down for any appreciable period of time
(say, only for updates to software, etc., back up in minutes not hours.)
3. You never had the problem before.
4. IBM considered your drives to be "outside the serial number range for
automatic replacement" at the time.

I had 68 brand new 2G internal drives on a 320 that was purchased during
the sticktion era. I did indeed power the system down each Sunday and
power it back on each Monday. This was standard operating procedure for
that company.

When we encountered the problem (7 drives did not come ready, but we
were mirrored so the machine came up anyway) we were asked by IBM to not
power down the system until they "determined the cause of the problem".
We did as they requested.

A week later we were told about "sticktion" and ALSO told that "the
drives were NOT in the range of serial numbers considered to have the
problem" and that IBM would NOT be replacing them.

For the next three days, I powered down the system every night and every
time we had drives not come ready, I placed a service call and had the
CE come out.

After the fourth call, IBM called the CE and asked him to convey a
message to us.

That message, in essence, is as follows:

Please do not power down your system again. We (IBM) will be shipping 68
new drives to Rochester were they will be burned in and shipped to your
CE. He will then use concurrent maintenance to replace ALL of your
drives during the course of next week.

And, yup, that's indeed what they did.
        
As for the two backups, ALWAYS a good idea when you think the machine
may go vegatative on you, such as Version and Release updates.


> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Pete Hall [mailto:pbhall@execpc.com]
> >Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 1999 3:36 AM
> >To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> >Subject: RE: Y2K Switchoff
> >
> >
> >At 14:08 09/28/1999 , Glenn Ericson wrote:
> >>Sounds  like  solid  logic  to me.
> >>         Glenn
> >>
> >>At 12:19 PM 9/28/99 -0500, John Cirocco wrote:
> >> >Colin,
> >> >
> >> >   We are bringing our plants mission critical pieces
> >Friday and bringing
> >> >them up Sunday morning.  We have been told that the local
> >energy supplier
> >> >expects no MAJOR problems but there is always the possibility of
> >> >localized problems.  Since my UPS has minutes vs. hours of
> >uptime, we
> >> >felt it best to shut the stuff down.
> >
> >I've been thinking about that too. The only concern I would
> >have is what if
> >one or (shudder) two of the disk drives refuse to spin up? If
> >everything
> >cools off for 8 hours or so, might this be a problem? I
> >propose doing a
> >complete system save immediately before. Maybe even two of them.
> >
> >Pete Hall

-- 
===========================================================
R. Bruce Hoffman, Jr.
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional System Administrator
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional Network Administrator

"The sum of all human knowledge is a fixed constant.
    It's the population that keeps growing!"
+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---