|
|
|||||||||||||
|
Tips
& Tricks
|
Troubleshooting
the "Unexpected Event 5" error June
4, 2002 ~ Last time I participated in an attempt to
troubleshoot the "Unexpected Event 5" error (April
'01) - an ASR-X user with a new, 2 GB SCSI attached
hard drive had experienced this error message. My
thinking at the time was: "hardware error - ASR-X
requires service." This was incorrect - the clues
were there, but were overlooked. Another
user felt certain, based on his own experience, the
capacity of the hard drive exceeded that which the
ASR-X could 'see.' He had previously tried a 2 GB
Jaz drive which did not work and as a consequence
assumed the ASR-X could not handle a disk capacity
greater than 1 GB. The original ASR-X and X Pro are
both DOS based machines and a FAT16, 2 GB drive (or
partition) is the maximum capacity the ASR-X can
'see.' Jaz drives/disks have always been
notoriously 'finicky' (that's a technical term) and
they behave no better with the ASR-X then any other
SCSI host. The
second user had a new, 2 GB SCSI attached hard
drive which had been formatted using the ASR-X
'DiskUtilities: Format Disk?' option. He
experienced the same "Event 5" error message as the
first user had with the 2 GB Jaz disk. The first
user recommended the second user reformat the 2 GB
hard drive and try again (good suggestion as it
turns out.) I've always used 100 MB Zip disks and
CDROMs with my X Pro and never encountered an
"Unexpected Event 5." I suppose the ASR-X OS is
more fault tolerant of lower capacities and 'read
only' media than devices capable of larger
capacities but this is nothing more than
speculation on my part...anyway, I never heard
again from the second user as to whether he
reformatted the 2 GB hard drive and if that action
resolved the problem. But
now - finally! - the following, unsolicited post
was sent to ASRXCITE regarding a more thorough
effort to troubleshoot and document the "Unexpected
Event 5." My thanks - again - to Paul Ryan for the
generous use of his time and providing this write
up for our benefit.
I
found your board recently as I had to work on a
'red devil' with the dreaded "Unexpected Event 5"
problem. I resolved the issue and thought your
readers might want to know what I found. The
drive in question was a 4 gig Quantum and the
machine was, of course, an ASR-X Pro. The guy who
owned the machine had formatted the drive using the
ASR-X - which then told him it was a 40 meg drive
(not 4 gig) and crashed with the Event 5 error any
time he wanted to save to it. When
he brought the drive to me, I hooked it up to a PC
with a SCSI II interface and ran the DOS
partitioning program 'FDISK'. FDISK told me that
the drive was formatted FAT16, with a partition
size of 4 gig (the total area of the drive). Now,
this is IMPOSSIBLE - FAT16 refers to a File
Allocation Table of 16 bits with a maximum size
cluster of 32k. Without
getting too technical, this equates to 65,536 x 32k
which gives a maximum possible size of 2 gig. This
is the great limitation of FAT16 and why FAT32 was
'invented'. FAT16 cannot have a partition size of 4
gig - no wonder the red devil wasn't
working...!! Now,
I don't know how or why the ASR-X could format the
drive with this impossible formula but I can
explain how I fixed it - repartitioned (using
FDISK) and reformatted under DOS. I reset the SCSI
ID to 2 (which Ensoniq recommends) as it was set to
ID 1. I gave the drive back to my muso friend and
he has been happily using it since - no "Unexpected
Error 5." A
few hints would be NOT to format the drive on the
ASR-X - beg borrow or steal a PC with a SCSI II
interface and do the format on that machine.
Second, be careful of formatting as FAT32 - if you
format as FAT32 with a 2 gig partition (2048 meg)
the size of the partition will actually be 2055 meg
as the File Allocation Table itself takes up 7 meg
of space. This 7 meg is ADDED to the partition size
you set in FDISK. So,
if you absolutely HAVE to format as FAT32, DO NOT
make the partition size larger than 2041 meg - I
would recommend 2040 meg, just to be on the safe
size. I
would recommend that you only format in FAT16 - the
maximum FDISK will allow you to make the partition
is 2047 meg - it automatically 'reserves' the 1 meg
FAT16 requires for its File Allocation
Table. Secondly,
make sure that you set the SCSI ID to 2. It
definitely worked on the ASR-X I was involved with
and I would love to know if it works on other
machines - so if you use this info and it works,
let me know at [email protected] cheers Paul
R BTW:
I am a tafe teacher/tech working at the Northern
Territory University, not a muso per se. The
machine I worked on was on of the students in
Contemporary music. -- ********************************* Paul
R Ryan
Addendum June
4, 2002 ~ Please note the default SCSI ID for the
ASR-X and X Pro is '2'. It's not a requirement the
ASR-X be set specifically to ID 2 - just that no
two SCSI ID numbers on a SCSI chain are identical.
Setting two ID numbers to the same value is
guaranteed to create a conflict. Please
be aware that IDs 0 and 1 are frequently used for
internal hard drives on host systems, 3 or 4 are
commonly used for CD-ROM drives, 5 or 6 are used
for Zip drives, and 7 is typically the host
CPU. Ensoniq
formerly set their devices (ASR-10/TS-10/EPS16+) to
SCSI ID 3 and it was *unchangeable* I think it is a
safe guess when Ensoniq moved away from proprietary
disk systems and implemented a DOS based system
with the ASR-X somebody intentionally chose ID 2 to
avoid a conflict with their legacy
products. An
excellent primer on SCSI 'Introduction to SCSI
Storage' can be found in the ASR-X Pro
Reference Manual on pages 82-88 followed
by a detailed explanation regarding the File Types
that can be saved on pages 88-90 and File Types
that can be loaded on pages 90-92. For
further reading on this subject check out the
'ASR-X
Getting Started
Guide'
and our intro to SCSI
Connections. JL |
||||||||||||
 |