From owner-freebsd-hardware  Wed Aug 20 13:13:33 1997
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From: pius@ienet.com
To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, terryl@ienet.com, robert@ienet.com
Subject: Re: wdunwedge failed
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 13:13:15 -0700
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On Wed, 20 Aug 1997, mike@smith.net.au wrote:
>
> > The console flashes on and off and logging in at the console or via telnet
> > doesn't work anymore.
>
> This is strange; what do you mean by "flashes on and off"?

It flickers. For example, a screen full of these "wdunwedge failed" error
messages appears for a second or two and then the screen completely blanks
out for a second. Then the error messages are visible again briefly, then
the screen goes blank, and so no. Sort of like someone quickly turning the
monitor on and off.

I wonder if this could be caused by the OS not being able to write to the
drive or if this might be a problem with the motherboard.

> It sounds like the drive is either overheating or on its way out;
> fix/replace it ASAP, and MAKE A BACKUP if you haven't already.

Yes, overheating seems to at least trigger this problem, but the drive
may be dying as well. This morning with the AC back on, the machine came up
fine again. Both times that it died was in the evening when the AC in the
room had been turned off.

The machine was acting only as a router with little more than the FreeBSD
2.2-970618 snapshot installed on the drive. So there's no important data
that'll be lost if the drive dies. We're already using another machine to
do the routing that the problem machine used to be doing.

Thanks for the help,
Pius