Incredible rumor about SPARCstation internal disk lossage

[Hugh Fader]

jaf at inference.com (Jose A. Fernandez) writes:

> Has anyone experienced the following problem?
> 
> Robert has informed us that there is a known problem that can cause
> internal disks in Sun workstations to die after being turned off!

I can verify this. We have a four-day weekend for Easter for which we
shutdown our machines -- SS1s with 2 100 MB Maxtor disks in each.  When we
came back one of our machines wouldn't boot due to disk failure.
Fortunately, we have a maintenance contract. The Sun technician came out
the same day and said he was swamped with service calls for this problem.
Apparently the actuator sticks on some of the Maxtor disks when they are
shut down for more than a short time.

The technician's first attempt at a fix was to pull out the offending disk
and bang on it with a telephone receiver. This had worked at his last
three calls, he said. It didn't work for us however. He had to replace the
disk.

If you ask me, Sun should replace free of charge any disks exhibiting this
problem -- maintenance contract or not.

Hugh Fader
hugh at slee01.srl.ford.com