tj@utcs.UUCP (Terry Jones) (03/11/85)
I just came back from SHARE in Los Angeles and there was a Birds of a Feather get together called IBM PC/AT user experience. Hard disk problems are not a rumour. They are a reality. It was something almost all in the session had in common... An interesting comment came up. When the hard disk seeks it makes a fair amount of noise. This is normally only heard when using the format program from the diagnostics. (The diag format does a physical format where as the regular format does a logical format) The other time this noise is heard is when the disk is about to cave in. It does a few retries and makes noises when doing it. Thus you can tell when it is about to croak by the quality of the audio it produces. I also hear that there are bugs in the backup program in that occasionally the floppies do not get the proper identification info written on them even though all the data really is there. When you try and restore it croaks unless you manually fix the floppy. There are updated versions of backup that no longer have this "feature". I have not got an AT but this is what I learned from a bunch of AT users. t.jones