General Category > Lisa Troubleshooting and Repair

BLU LLF Failing

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compu_85:
Ya, sounds like a bug in BLU then, because if it's not a 0, the process bombs out.

-J

blusnowkitty:
And indeed, most of the time during the spare sector format when it errored out the stepper motor would be halfway or 3/4 across the surface of the disk.

sigma7:
Thanks for the clarification, I'll add this to the bug list.


--- Quote from: patrick on September 29, 2021, 02:58:34 am ---
--- Quote from: blusnowkitty on September 25, 2021, 11:19:46 pm ---Any clues on why low-level formatting a 5MB Profile with BLU is failing during the Spare Sector format? I keep seeing Status 00000001 or 00000003 midway through the Spare Sector format.

--- End quote ---

This is no fault. It just means that 1 resp. 3 spare blocks are in use. As long as this number is below 0x1F your drive will be useable.

--- End quote ---

mikerofone:
Hi,

I'm bumping this old thread since I also am trying to LLF a 5MB ProFile using BLU, and I'm getting an INIT SPARE TABLE FAILED error after the disk stepped through all sectors after doing the first pass of the LLF. Is it possible that this means that the spares table remains unpopulated?
Before the drive became unhappy, it would do a few seeks to the spare sectors during its self-test towards the end of the test, so I assume that these bad sectors were properly replaced by spares at some time. Now, after these incomplete LLFs, it spends 5-10 seconds on the bad tracks without doing any seeks, before stepping to the next track. It then continues the self-test to completion and the BUSY light becomes solid.

However, the the Lisa doesn't see the drive at all! It hangs for a long time while enumerating boot devices before (without showing any errors) requesting a boot from floppy, and the LOS installer reports not finding any disk after ~10-15sec.
Only if I turn on the Lisa right after turning on the ProFile will the drive respond to Lisa. About 15 seconds after turning on Lisa will the drive do its self-test, and the installer will see the drive. The first time I managed to format the disk and install up to disk 4 before the installer errored out with "cannot write to drive", but after trying the LLF again a couple times I never got that far again. The installer now errors out with the same error immediately when trying to format.

I cannot rule out that might be additional defects on my ProFile besides a loss of its formatting (after the drive turned bad I noticed that its PSU only gave 4.4V on the 5V rail, which I fixed without it making a difference). However, the fact that post-LLF the self-test now steps through the previously-good tracks exactly as before suggests to me that most of the drive is working correctly. The odd behaviour is the lack of seeks-to-spare-location on the bad tracks, and the fact that the drive goes silent after the self-test completes.

I also tried NeoWidEx, but any command talking to the ProFile just hangs immediately. I think my machine is a Lisa 2/10, with the ProFile connected to its internal parallel port via a bracket connecting to the internal 26 pin ribbon connector, and with ROM H/88. So I think it should work? However, it seemed that all the Widget-specific items in the menu were enabled, so maybe it misdetects my ProFile as a widget. Such confuse, very mystery!

What a looong preamble, sorry! ;) I have a few questions:

* Other posters on this thread reported that even with the failure, their drives were working again. Did your drives actually have bad sectors, and did the power-on self-test behavior change in the same way?
* Is there a newer version of BLU than 0.90 which is able to handle bad sectors (if that's the actual problem here), and which can complete the INIT SPARE SECTOR TABLE process?
I remember reading that BLU was created before the LLF source code was available by mimicing the commands sent from the Apple /// software, and I assume the disk used for that didn't have bad sectors, so that code path could be unimplemented.
Edit: Maybe I should consider building an ArduinoFile instead, as it also has an LLF operation and seems to be (more?) aware of the possibility of bad sectors.
* Do you know whether an ArduinoFile would give me a better shot at doing a successful LLF on a disk with a few bad sectors?Thanks a ton for reading all this! If you are still interested in more information, here's some pictures and additional information in a Google Photos album, including a video of the self-test when the disk was still OK: https://photos.app.goo.gl/q8qhYzUUmivfC35P7

Cheers
mikerofone

patrick:
Your photos show return code 00 00 00 xx, so the INIT SPARE TABLE command passed. The last digit indicates the number of spares used. In your case it is between 03 and 04. The number may increase after a couple of surface scans.

The diagnotic firmware always reports 0 spares used. To see the correct number you have to use the RW firmware.


If your drive fails during power-up with the stock firmware, you'll have some hardware problem that is not related to the formatting. Try a different Z8 chip (e.g. your piggyback with a RW ROM) and check the ripple on the power supply voltages.

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