MOOERS%bbna@sri-unix.UUCP (06/21/83)
We also have some Tandon drives, which we bought about a year and a half ago. They are single drives, in metal cases. We had no trouble until a few months ago when the power supply in one drive failed. After we had the power supply replaced with a reconditioned power supply, and probably unrelated to that, I sysgenned a couple of new system disks and immediately started getting warm boot errors, on either of two disks, whenever I exited from a program such as an editor or a modem program, and also (much worse) whenever I tried to write to disk from within the program. I found that if I opened the door of the drive and wiggled or moved the disk slightly, the disk would reboot without fail. I could then write to disk, if I gave the command right away. I could also prevent errors by wiggling the disk BEFORE I wrote to disk or exited from the program. (This is clearly kludgy, but it works, and, fortunately, SpellBinder, my usual editor allows me to restart and capture the text in the buffer.) After I read your message, I tried configuring my drives to 12 ms seek time instead of 6 ms, and I got the warm boot errors just the same. The owner of the store that sold us the Tandons suggested that the power supply might be running too hot. I then realized that I had sysgenned my new system disks when the drives were just turned on, and therefore cold. I have now re-sysgenned after the system had been running for over an hour, and have had only one "BDOS error", followed by a "warm boot" error. So maybe I have partially conquered the problem. I don't know how to adjust the temperture of the power supply. These single drives do not have cooling fans. I can't tell from the catalog whether the Heath H37 does or not. I haven't yet looked into the SECERR counter, but I shall. ---Charlotte Mooers