Miniscribe 8438 and ATT 7300

[Paul Riddle]

Hi,

I have just bought a 7300 with a 20 meg drive.  I also have a Miniscribe
8438 (30 meg, 3.5 inches, 68ms, shock mount) and was wondering if it
would drop in in place of the 20 meg.  It came as a package with an
RLL controller (Western Digital WD1002A-27X I think) but no data sheet,
so I'm not sure if it will work with the controller in the UNIX PC or
not.  Assuming I can get a data sheet from Miniscribe, how do I go
about formatting it (since it is not listed as one of the drive options
in the Diagnostic program)?

On another subject, I am considering returning my 20 meg because I think
it might be faulty.  I brought UNIX up (with no problems) and it was
running flawlessly for about 6 hours.  Then the hard disk started making
sort of a whining noise (it sort of sounded like it was speeding up)
and I got a message something like "panic-init failed, press hardware
reset to reboot".  Now it won't re-boot, and whenever I try to do something
with the disk (including parking the heads) I get a message something
like "Hard drive restore failed, response=4".  Any ideas?

Thanks,
-- 
Paul Riddle                         | paulr at umbc3.umbc.edu
Univ. Of Md., Baltimore County      | ..!{uunet,haven}!umbc3!paulr