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Date: Sun 30-Mar-1989 23:37:37 From: Unknown Subject: Strange optical disk problems We've been having some strange problems with our optical disks and I was hoping someone in netland might be able to explain what's going on (and how to fix them!). We're running a SCSI-based NeXT and using the optical disks for data storage. The data files tend to be quite large (on the order of 75 megabytes each). We've reformatted the optical to a single partition to allow us to store the large data files. Now for the fun stuff. The first problem is 'soft timeouts'. These don't appear to be a real problem but can someone explain what's going on? Here is a portion of the console log when the problems occured (we were in the process of writing one of these 75MB files to the optical): Home is /bootdisk/Homes/holmer Path is .:~/Apps:/bootdisk/Apps:/bootdisk/NeXT/Apps: /bootdisk/Programming/Demos Disk Label: backup Label Version #2 off -8 lastexp 94 lastmode 1 RJ 0x513f od0a: write re-spin (soft timeout) block 4440 phys block 4720 (4444:0:0) off -8 lastexp 93 lastmode 1 RJ 0x513f od0a: write re-spin (soft timeout) block 67800 phys block 68400 (8424:0:0) The other problem is more serious. We aren't able to write more than one 75 meg file. When we try to generate the second one, we get lots of strange disk full errors when df shows something like 134 meg unused. The file also appears to be there when we do an ls (it shows a size of ~75 megs). However, the file is empty when we look at it!? Below is a script showing some of the oddities, anyone have any ideas? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Script started on Sun Mar 19 19:52:52 1989 bam:/MyDisk/Homes/carlton <1> cd ~holmer/backup/traces bam:/bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup/traces <2> ls -l total 148688 -rw-r--r-- 1 carlton 77019406 Mar 19 19:42 foo -rw-r--r-- 1 holmer 76697566 Mar 18 19:42 foo.old -rw-r--r-- 1 carlton 166812 Mar 19 17:24 nrev bam:/bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup/traces <3> head foo.old f 1 0 f 1 1 f 1 2 w 2 10 w 2 11 f 1 3 w 2 12 w 2 13 f 1 4 f 1 5 # The foo.old file was generated first and is fine bam:/bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup/traces <4> head foo # The foo file was generated second, however, it is empty!? # Why does 'ls' shows it to have 77 meg? bam:/bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup/traces <5> du . 148689 . bam:/bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup/traces <6> df Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 258991 146798 86293 63% / /dev/sd0b 88423 70482 9098 89% /bootdisk/NeXT /dev/od0a 234963 149706 61760 71% /bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup bam:/bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup/traces <7> wc foo 0 0 0 foo # Here is the console log bam:/bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup/traces <8> more /tmp/console.log Home is /bootdisk/Homes/holmer Path is .:~/Apps:/bootdisk/Apps:/bootdisk/NeXT/Apps:/bootdisk/Programming/Demos Mar 19 18:47:37 bam su: carlton on /dev/ttyb Mar 19 18:50:10 bam su: carlton on /dev/ttyb Mar 19 19:00:29 bam su: carlton on /dev/ttyb IO error on pageout: error = 22. vnode_pageout: failed! IO error on pageout: error = 22. vnode_pageout: failed! # and 28 more 'IO error on pageout: error = 22' deleted IO error on pageout: error = 28. vnode_pageout: failed! IO error on pageout: error = 28. vnode_pageout: failed! # Filesystem full?? Mar 19 19:42:19 bam vmunix: /bootdisk/Homes/holmer/backup: file system full # and 35 more 'IO error on pageout: error = 28.' deleted script done on Sun Mar 19 19:57:21 1989 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And finally, just to make things more confusing. We unmounted the optical, rebooted the system and remounted the optical. The contents of the foo file now appeared, but the end of the file was truncated (we didn't find out how much of the file was truncated, unfortunately. My guess is that somehow the pageout process died or got confused (I don't know anything about the internals of Mach, so this is almost certainly wrong). Could the problem be the virtual memory size of the process creating the file? Or, is there some hard-coded limit to partition size? I notice that 150 meg is the size of the /a partition on a normally formatted, two-partition optical. Could there be some relation here? Thanks in advance for any and all hints you can offer. This is a real problem if we can't put more than 1 75 meg file per optical. >From: abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell)
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