cam2@ur-tut.UUCP (Craig McGowan) (11/20/85)
I recently purchased a HyperDrive 20, and although I am in general quite
happy with it, I thought I'd share this experience with the net community.
While I was using my HyperDrive last friday it began to act quite flakey. It
would crash occasionally, usually when a program was opened. I began to
suspect that the problem was hardware related, so I ran the disk check program.
Sure enough, there were a number of bad sectors on the disk. At this point I
resorted to reading the manual.
It was suggested that I backup the disk (I had already) then initialize. This
did not help: programs still crashed, bad blocks were still there. Next step:
format the disk. This is where things get really interesting.
The format command gave a message saying I had a hardware problem - see my
dealer. I did. They did not know the answer, so they called General Computer.
GCC put us on hold for about 1/2 hour, then said they were closing up shop for
the weekend, they would call back. They did.
The software *always* reports a hardware error when the format command is
chosen, even if there is nothing wrong with the drive!!!
You can format the disk if you use some command-option key combination when
selecting format. This overrides the system password, and is not documented
in the manual. It is amazing to me that no one even tried to format a disk
using the format command. At least I have my system back now, I shudder to
think how long a *real* hardware problem would take to solve.
Craig McGowan
uucp: ...!{ seismo | allegra | decvax )!rochester!mcgowan
arpa: mcgowan@rochester