Mauna Loa Solar Observatory Observer's Log ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thu Mar 17 21:07:53 GMT 1994 Year: 94 Doy: 076 Observer: yasukawa COMMENT: Thu Mar 17 21:09:29 GMT 1994 Heavy overcast today. No observations. DPMON COMMENT: Thu Mar 17 21:10:34 GMT 1994 Installed a more "permanent" tape over null holes on aperture wheel encoder. Removed Halle heater connectoor and cable, modified connector plate and ran power cable from Daystar heater controller thru plate. Sealed up hole and remounted connector plate. As is pretty much standard operating procedure, a wire brole off the Halle in/out motor during the process and had to be resoldered. COMMENT: Thu Mar 17 21:14:40 GMT 1994 Lowl was stopped this morning, Exabyte unit 1 containing tape L00013 was popped, unit 0 containing L00012 displayed message that it was unable to communicate. Ejected both units and tried reloading the tapes back in. Had to cycle unit power to unit 0 to get tape to eject (to get unit to respond at all for that matter. ). Called Howard Hull and got him to find David Elmore. We came up with a plan. I replaced Exabyte unit 1 (DAK installed the spare unit at that location yesterday) with the original unit 1. I cleaned the heads of both units, reloaded the tapes, then tried to restart the program. Typed in lowl. Program seemed to start OK, but then the program seemed to hang up waiting to initialize tape drive. After a very long wait, I tried rebooting, as I could not get a sync message to execute a "q" to stop. Reboot failed. Bootstrap gets to the display of the FASST ROM header and then stops. Lowl program does not start, I cannot get a C:\ prompt to check autoexec.bat or anything. Well, so much for not ever having to mess with the Lowl except for changing tapes scenario. Thu Mar 17 21:32:32 GMT 1994: Filemark COMMENT: ADDITIONAL ENTRY AFTER END DAY INVOKED. Thu Mar 17 23:31:55 GMT 1994 Tried a bunch of tests and determined that the SCSI card got wiped. - Tried disconnecting Exabytes at computer--hangs at same place. - Tried booting with diskette--hangs same place. - Tried removing WD SCSI card--hangs at FASST RAM header (progress!) - Tried installing AT's SCSI card--hangs at FASST RAM header. Addresses probably wrong. - With SCSI card removed, edited boot diskette to REMark out the DEVICE=SSTBIO.SYS line in the config.sys file, then rebooted using diskette.--Got thru the boot to the a:\ prompt! Sooooo... David and Kim got the skids greased to purchase a new card, while I called the folks at Columbia Data Products Inc. to find out what their policy is. Talked to Steve. Western Digital no longer makes the WD7000 board. They have a stock on hand and will sell us one for $349. KVS ordered it NEXT DAY AIR. I will call back tomorrow to get an RMA # to send the old card back for $50 credit. We will hold onto the old board until the new one arrives to compare before installation and to set addresses if necessary. What was learned? We need to TURN OFF RACK POWER not just computer power when changing SCSI cables. Exabyte drives do not turn off with the processor. There may still be a problem with a flaky drive, although it could be that the interface was slowly going bad. We probably drove a stake thru it with all the swapping with the drives powered up. Lowl will be left with the spar power on and the rack power off.