johnl@cca.UUCP (11/05/84)
#N:ima:12700005:000:1568
ima!johnl Nov 5 12:24:00 1984
I am rather concerned that the PC AT's disk doesn't work reliably. Of the
six PC ATs that we have here at Javelin, four of them have started to get
"General Failure" errors on their fixed disk. On one of them, track zero
went bad so it couldn't boot from the fixed disk so we had to have the disk
replaced; fortunately, our dealer had a spare drive.
I suspect that the problem is that the testing and formatting procedures
for the AT's disk are so minimal that it doesn't find marginal spots on the
disk when formatting, so you find them when trying to get work done.
A few years back, I used a PDP-11 with RP02 disks. The RP02 was also 20MB and
about the same speed as an AT's disk (the only difference being that it was
the size of a washing machine.) DEC provided pretty good diagnostics for
the RP02, one of which was a confidence test that rattled the disk and read
and wrote, looking for errors. You were supposed to run it for 12 hours to
be sure your disk worked. None of the AT's diagnostics run as long as 5
minutes, so it's hard to believe they test the drive other than to verify
that it exists and perhaps can read or write a track or two.
Has anybody else had AT disk trouble ? (We've only had ours for a month or
so, so they fail pretty fast.) Anybody have any non-trivial disk diagnostics?
Our dealer doesn't. Any other suggestions (except to get rid of them?)
John Levine, Javelin Software, Cambridge MA 617-494-1400
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Levine@YALE.ARPA (or try ima!johnl@CCA-UNIX, since my Yale machine is down.)