Something very mysterious happens with my SyQuest EZFlyer.
I don't know (and can't analyze) whether this is kernel-,
driver-, or even SyQuest-related.
This drive is an external SCSI device.
The normal "ritual" is:
1.) Switch on the drive.
2.) Insert media, wait for spinning up the motor.
After the sound of a landing bee has vanished,
the drive is ready for take-off....
3.) Switch on the computer and the monitor.
4.) The prompts shows me, that the adaptor
card has recognized all devices including
the SyQuest EZFlyer correctly.
5.) The linux-boot-prompt pops up, and after a short
period v2.1.56 of the kernel boots, also
recognizing the SyQuest device correctly.
6.) Work starts, pur efun with LINUX ;-)
7.) Mounting the SyQuest works ok, I can read and
write to the drive.
...slowly and surely the dark horror is crawling down
the PCI bus to grab all that innocent PNP cards...
8.) I unmount the SyQuest, but let it turned on.
9.) I remove the media to give the spin motor time to relax.
10.)After a while I need again acces to some data stored on
another media.
11.)I insert the media.
12.)AND: Mounting fails with very creative ways of failures:
"media is write protected" (SyQuest EZFlyer uses a software
write protection)
"bad superblock, try to blabla"
"." (which means te mount-command
waits for christmas...)
and so on.
13.) For being sure I unmount the device again and reboot.
14.) NOW: The reboot of the computer shows, that the device
isn't recognized neither by the adaptor nor by the kernel
correctly: The string showing the vendor's name and
the device name is corrupted or totally invisible.
The only thing, which helps: Switch off the SyQuest, reboot
to DOS (blame on me! ;-) to give the SyQuest time to relax
and after some minutes: GOTO 1.)
My question: Is it possible, that the driver/kernel "forgets" the
drive after a while of inactivity and/or writes some rubbish
to the drive? The above is reproducable and appears first with v2.1.56.
Haven't found it before.
KEEP HACKING!
meino
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E-Mail: Meino Christian Cramer <root@solfire.ludwigsburg.netsurf.de>
Date: 23-Sep-97
Time: 20:56:04
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