richardh@killer.UUCP (Richard Hargrove) (12/21/87)
I have been having a very annoying problem with the 1.2 meg floppy drive on my AT clone system. For no apparent reason it dies with a critical error General Failure error reading drive A Abort, Retry, Fail? after which I must cycle power on the machine to regain access to the drive (neither a warm boot via alt-ctrl-del nor a hard reset via the reset switch regains the functionality of the drive). This problem occurs only when MS-DOS is booted on the system (no problems with MicroPort SYS V). I was told locally that there is a bug in the MS-DOS driver for the high-density floppy drive and have now upraded MS-DOS twice (versions 3.2, 3.21, and 3.3) but the problem persists. Other information: the system is a 12 mhz/1 ws Wells American, with 1 meg of memory, WD controller, two floppy drives (1.2 meg and 360k), and a miniscribe 6085. The problem itself is sporadic (maybe 2-3 times in one hour or never in a week). I can't find a sequence of operations that consistently causes it. My major concern is continually powering down the 6085, though in general, nothing good can come from it. About six months ago somebody posted a patch to IO.SYS in MS-DOS 3.2 that would fix a problem with not being able to format 1.2 meg floppies. Could this problem be related (and the same or similar patch fix the problem)? Any ideas or hints from anybody would be appreciated. richard hargrove ...!ihnp4!killer!richardh -------------------------
fredrick@acdpyr.ucar.edu (Tim Fredrick) (12/22/87)
In article <2525@killer.UUCP> richardh@killer.UUCP (Richard Hargrove) writes: >I have been having a very annoying problem with the 1.2 meg floppy drive >on my AT clone system. For no apparent reason it dies with a critical >error > >General Failure error reading drive A >Abort, Retry, Fail? > >after which I must cycle power on the machine to regain access to the drive A year ago, I bought a Rokoa 6/10 MHz AT and experienced what might be the same problem (diskette drive fails randomly and you have to power down the computer). It seemed to occur more often with 1.2 Mb diskettes than with 360 Kb diskettes. After exchanging hardware boards, operating systems, disk drives, etc, we eventually came to the conclusion that the Western Digital disk controller was speed-dependent. That is, it failed sometimes when the speed of the computer was 10 MHz. So, now I switch the AT to 6 MHz whenever I need to do work with floppies. If anyone else has experienced this problem, has found a different cause, or has a fix for this situation, it would be good to hear from you. -Tim Fredrick-----------------------------------------------------