[comp.sys.amiga] Help! Hard disk

scott@stsci.EDU (Jim Scott) (10/24/90)

HELP!  I had a really horrible experience this morning.

When I turned on my A3000 it asked whether I wanted to boot
from 1.3 or 2.0.  It normally only does this when you cold
boot and hold down both mouse keys.

Well I thought, maybe it was just some quirk.  So I clicked
for 2.0 from the harddrive.  NOTHING.  I clicked for 1.3 from
the harddrive.  ZILCH.

So I pulled out by 2.0 kickstart and WB backups and booted from floppy.

When it finished....no sign of my hard disk!  No Icon.  No nothing.
YIKES!

So I cold booted again.  Same thing.
SO I prayed to the patron saint of hard drives, and tried a third time.
Completely normal.  It booted from the hard disk into 2.0  The harddisk
is there.  Files seem okay....

What the hell happened?  Is my harddisk about to crash after two 
months of use?

On a (maybe?  hmmmm...) related note...I once heard that when you
boot, a RAM test is performed and the colours etc. of the screen
could indicate problems.  Well, just after I bought and installed
4 Meg of 1Mx4 for my FAST last month a broad dark line would appear
when I boot.  It sits there, then scrolls up, then jitters around and vanishes
about the time WB appears.  It only really does this when I turn on
the machine after it being off for at least a few hours. If
I cold boot after it's nice and warm the broad black band doesn't appear.
Is this a RAM problem or a monitor (1950) problem.

HELP HELP!

Jim

Scott@stsci.edu

nad@tegra.COM (Nancy Durgin) (10/24/90)

In article <1924@nemesis.stsci.edu> scott@stsci.EDU (Jim Scott) writes:
>
>HELP!  I had a really horrible experience this morning.
>
>When I turned on my A3000 it asked whether I wanted to boot
>from 1.3 or 2.0.  It normally only does this when you cold
>boot and hold down both mouse keys.
>
> [ Horror story of powering on 3000 and having it not recognize
>   hard drive ]

I've had this happen to me a few times, too (I have an A3000-25/100).

Basically, if you had looked closely at the boot screen it presented
you, you would have noticed that the "hard disk" selection for both
1.3 and 2.0 was grayed out.  That's why nothing happened when you selected
it.

The first time this happened to me, I panicked, too...  But I just powered
off the machine and powered back on again (leaving a few seconds in between,
of course), and everything was normal the second time.

My assumption is that every once in a while the Quantum doesn't become
ready fast enough for the 3000 (it's a pretty short time out), and so it
doesn't think the drive is there.  This happens to me about 1 time in 10,
and always works fine on the second try.

The fact that it has happened to somebody else makes me feel better...

	Nancy

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Nancy Durgin          | (Usual disclaimers | Tegra-Varityper, Inc. 
tegra!nad@uunet.com   | apply...)          | Billerica, Massachusetts
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