[comp.sys.ibm.pc] RLL revisited

dve@zooid.UUCP (David Mason) (10/30/90)

First of all, I'd like to thank .... augh, I lost the name. I'd like to 
thank Mr. X in Sweden who provided the necessary information to allow me to 
format my Micropolis 70mb MFM drive to 110MB RLL. 

My drive model is the 1325. I recieved about 6 replies from people who had 
the same or similiar (1335) drive and had RLLd their drives and have been 
running them for an average of about a year with no problems.

My drive had no errors MFM, and has no RLL, however, I am experiencing one 
irritating problem.. most of the time it performs very well, much faster 
than MFM, but occasionally (I'd say once in a few megs worth of transfer) 
while reading the disk it experiences a read error... nothing fatal, because 
when I retry (through DOS or in a program) it works with no problems. If I 
copy a large directory to another drive it might experience the problem, but 
then if I copy the same batch of files again the problem will not occur, at 
least not in the same place. I am more suspicious of the drive controller 
(clone Western Digital card, 1:1 interleave) than the drive right now, and I 
will try disabling the card's 8k cache as soon as I can find the #(*& 
manual! (actually, photocopied piece of paper). It could also be an interupt 
conflict of some sort but I have disabled shadow BIOS.