johnl@ima.UUCP (11/27/84)
It appears that the PC AT has severe disk reliability problems, and that
IBM is not planning to do anything about it soon.
We have six PC ATs, and five of them have developed bad spots on their
disks. We tried reformatting them with the regular FORMAT program. No
dice -- it didn't find any more bad spots than it had previously.
I talked to my sister, who works for a big company with access to IBM's
PC problem data base, so she asked them. Their answer seemed to be that
yes, sometimes AT disks flake out, and that reformatting them with the
advanced diagnostic formatter usually fixes it. Great, the advanced
diagnostics cost $295. My (non-IBM) repairman was kind enough to lend
me his formatter, and I reformatted my disk, which included about 5
minutes of surface analysis. Still no dice -- it still didn't find any
more bad spots.
I would suspect that there is some sort of problem where data always
reads just fine 2 seconds after you write it, but due to close track
spacing or something, data on the disk degrades and becomes unreadable
in spots after a week or two. Pfui.
The AT has other strangenesses, too. About half the time when I hit
ctrl/break, the system hangs up and I have to power cycle to reboot. It
appears to be halted or hung, because the keyboard indicator lights,
which are updated at interrupt time, decline to change.
Also, it sometimes gets into a rather inconvenient state where it is
doing eternal print screens, wasting paper very noisily. Again, the
only fix seems to be power cycling. Pfui.
John Levine, Javelin Software, Cambridge MA 617-494-1400
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Levine@YALE.ARPA