santerel@grad1.cis.upenn.edu (Walter A. Santarelli) (03/10/90)
I wonder if there are other net-users out there that have had similar problems. It seems that my CA-880 is exhibiting some strange behaviour. I hesitate to say that it's broken because in most respects it performs fine. Most of the time when I access df1: to save or read files, the data is saved or retrieved flawlessly. Occasionally, however, the drive spins briefly and the LED lights for a very short time. When I ask for a directory of the disk, it shows the files successfully copied. When I eject the disk and replace it, the files are gone. This only seems to occur with small files (i.e. under 2K). It also occurs with certain disk operations such as "snapshot"ing the disk icon location, renaming the disk, and creating empy directories. I'm fairly certain that this isn't a viral problem since all of these operations work on df0: with the same floppy disks. Has anyone experienced similar problems with external drives? (Incidentally, I'm using an A500.) I'm inclined to believe its a hardware problem. Which is too bad since this is the kind of error that typically never repeats itself in front of service personell. I do wonder, however, if it's not something else. Does the AMIGA use any memory caching? I know the 68000 uses memory mapped IO and if this is cached it could potentially cause just this sort of problem with hardware IO devices. I sincerely hope that this is not the case. Still this wouldn't explain why it only happens on the external drive; unless the external drive port is somehow treated differently than the internal drive. If anyone has any insights into this phenomenon, I'd appreciate hearing from them. Thanks. Walter ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Son My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few. - R. Kipling ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- e-mail: santerel@grad1.cis.upenn.edu
aijpo@castle.ed.ac.uk (Joel Potter) (03/10/90)
This won't help, but the Amiga does have a buffer for disk IO, and I believe the default is ... 2K!!! A hardware fault that didn't reach the IO kernel would make the Amiga believe everything was succesful, and the lock on the directory is updated to show the new files. As to fixing it, I don't know. The problem does (I would guess) lie in the drive, though. -- DarkAngel! | "the rumours of my death are greatly AI/CS 1 | exaggerated" <aijpo@uk.ac.ed.castle> | - Mark Twain