kpicott@alias.UUCP (Socrates) (08/20/90)
Yes, I've stooped to bribery. I have five original games and I am willing
to part with any one of them in trade for a solution to my hard disk
problems. (See the bottom for details.)
This is really starting to get me down. For over a year now I
have been attempting to get my hard drive working. Not including the
total lack of documentation on the Mountlist I have run into no end of
trouble. I find it difficult to blame the hard drive because it has been
checked and re-checked at several different places. My only alternative
is that some or all of my Commodore equipment is bad or buggy.
Here is the entire saga (gentlemen, please hold your lady's hand if she's at
all squeamish).
My system : Fujitsu 2249SA hard drive, 320M formatted capacity purchased
from a reputable dealer who have actually given me a lot of
support. Set up with two partitions, size 20M (old file
system) and 300M (Fast file system).
Amiga 2000 with 4M Supra expansion RAM.
1 Commodore 1050(?) external floppy drive.
Commodore 2090A hard drive expansion card.
May, 1989: I purchase my hard drive from a lead I got off the net. The
price is reasonable and other people have indicated that the
drive is fairly reliable (no horror stories...until now).
June, 1989: My drive arrives. I go to my local dealer and purchase the
2090A, since I want an autobooting system. I get a very thin
piece of documentation that tells me how to install my drive
along with the appropriate software.
Meticulously I follow the instructions and after several tries
at a Mountlist the drive is up and running. Alright!
Now I'm playing with power!
July-August, 1989:
Joyfully I begin filling up my new hard drive with PD software
that has been sitting around on floppies, and my various
purchased programs that are installable. Around the end of
August I get the idea to back up my files, "just in case".
September, 1989:
Disaster strikes. I get the infamous "error validating disk"
error. A trip to the local dealer and some net discussion
leads me to DiskX, using which I delete the offending file.
Everything returns to normal.
January, 1990:
A larger but more subtle disaster strikes. One day a requester
pops up that says "Error on DH2: Bad block". Wait a minute...
SCSI drives are supposed to map out bad blocks automatically,
aren't they? Something is wrong, so I once again visit my
local dealer. He confirms my suspicion and advises deleting
the offending file.
Later on that month the same error happens again. This time
the big one hits. I am scanning through some documentation
files and I suddenly notice that most of them have been
mysteriously wiped out in the second block of data. (From
what I could gather using DiskX the second block being pointed
to was not valid data, but a block full of 0's.) Here's an
even weirder part: If I ran "MORE" on the file it would show
up file. If I ran "Stevie", "less" or "muchmore" on the file
I would see the trashed version of the file.
Major panic sets in. I thank my lucky stars that I have all
of my files on floppy (well, almost all...but all the important
ones anyway). I spend an entire weekend reformatting and
restoring the files onto the drive.
After restoring I check the files and something even stranger
is happening. I "less" the file once and it appears okay. I
read some other files, then "less" it agaiFebruary, 1990:
I determine that hardware failure has not occurred (at least
within the disk). Commodore suggests that the 2090A might be
at fault so I bring it back to the dealer for testing. He
runs it through some tests and indicates that it is fine.
As if I didn't have enough problems, the drive is damaged in
transport from the dealers and now has a diagnostic error.
I ship my disk back to where I bought it for repairs. At this
point I am in no hurry and really just want to get the darn
thing working properly so I can get on with everything. They
search around for somewhere to do it and in the end manage to
get it fixed for $170. I am satisfied with this since up here
in Canada I was given estimates in the $600 range.
May, 1990: My disk returns. The formatting procedure occurs again, after
several inquiries about possible problems with the Mountlist
causing my disk errors I repartition the disk and format again.
(Thanks to Bill Seymour for some hints on this.) Restoring the
disk is spread out over a month because I have other work to do
and at this time am totally frustrated with the thing.
July, 1990: Gradually I gain some confidence in the disk and start to
rearrange my directories and install some new software that I
recently bought. The restore went well and all of my text files
that were trashed earlier seem to be in good shape.
August, 1990:
History repeats itself! The formerly good-looking text files
are now trashed in exactly the same manner (second block points
to junk). I am cautiously now tiptoeing around my drive and
not touching anything, in case it doesn't like me or something,
so that I can attack the files in their original corrupt format
if (and when) I get a solution.
=== ===
\ / \ /
-+- -+-
/ \ / \ --------------------
| / \
| | Not again !!!!!!! |
| \ /
+-- / -------------------
/ /
--===-- /--
/ \
\ /
--===--
So that's my story. As I said I have become extremely frustrated with this
whole situation and am willing to offer one of my games (LSL, LSL2, Rocket
Ranger, one of the Stargliders and Sex Vixens from Space) to any verifiable
solution to this problem. Heck, if it solves my problems you can take more
than one... take all five if you want. The time and effort I've put into
trying to fix this thing more than justifies the sacrifice. As an added
bonus, if the solution can be stated in a single sentence (like "plug your
drive in"), you can come up here and kick my butt in person for being such
an idiot! Act now, this is an unlimited time offer!
--
Kevin Picott aka Socrates aka kpicott%alias@csri.toronto.edu
Alias Research Inc. 110 Richmond St. E. Toronto, Ontario... M5C 1P1
(416) 362-9181 x336peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) (08/21/90)
In article <kpicott.651158188@sapporo> kpicott@alias.UUCP (Socrates) writes: > ... I find it difficult to blame the hard drive because it has been >checked and re-checked at several different places. My only alternative >is that some or all of my Commodore equipment is bad or buggy. You gave a very complete list of all steps taken. But I miss one very important in these days: Check for virus! Especially the "DASA" virus is told to write garbage to random sectors on floppies and HDs. Just use one of your disk monitors and scan your disk for the string DASA. You tell you have also some games installed to your HD. Games are good candidates for bad programming. Perhaps one of these doesn't know the FastFilingSystem and corrupts some vital information? Could you find any coincidence between using a certain game (or other software) and those trashed files? (BTW, DPaint III under 2.0 on an A3000 gives you very corrupt files after saving. Itself can read those files, but no normal IFF viewer can, and a disk analyzer finds totally corrupt block chaining pointers in the OFS data blocks on a diskette.) So, my simple advice is, look also after your software that may harm your disk. One last thought: Please check that you have the newest version of FFS, there were changes during the last years :-) (But I think to remember that you only could run into real problems with disks bigger than 600 MB, or am I wrong?) -- Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to Commodore Frankfurt, Germany \X/ rutgers!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk
aduncan@rhea.trl.oz.au (Allan Duncan) (08/27/90)
From article <kpicott.651158188@sapporo>, by kpicott@alias.UUCP (Socrates): > Yes, I've stooped to bribery. I have five original games and I am willing > to part with any one of them in trade for a solution to my hard disk > problems. (See the bottom for details.) [much explanation deleted] At this distance I won't enter into the bidding, however I will make a few suggestions. Do you know anyone with a 2000 that you could substitute you controller/drive into? Someone with another 2091 (was that the one, I've forgotten) would be even better if they would agree to swap controllers for a week or two (or a friendly dealer/repair centre with a shop unit). Also is there any correlation with software that you use prior to the failure? The reason why I ask is that I had a lot of trouble after I installed the obese agnus. The first one I installed would clobber menus, or other areas of the display as menus were manipulated. This same IC has performed flawlessly ever since in another 2000, whilst its replacement _only_ failed when using Professional Page with its heavy DMA load of 4 bit planes and overscan PAL screen (it kills 2090A's as well!). I finally bought a new Denise and the problem hasn't reappeared for a fortnight. If you can see my drift here, there might be some address mashing going on that affects the disk system's idea of what it is doing. Allan Duncan ACSnet a.duncan@trl.oz (03) 541 6708 ARPA a.duncan%trl.oz.au@uunet.uu.net UUCP {uunet,hplabs,ukc}!munnari!trl.oz!a.duncan Telecom Research Labs, PO Box 249, Clayton, Victoria, 3168, Australia.