lgreen@pnet01.cts.com (Lawrence Greenwald) (10/29/89)
Recently, my GVP hardcard, which contains an 80-meg Quantum Prodrive, began to
act weird (weird as in shutting down in the middle of disk accesses, both read
and write (ouch)). This caused much gnashing of teeth, hair-pulling,
finger-pointing and the like. I had bought my card at the Los Angeles World of
Commodore show this past May. I bought it from the Creative Computers booth
there so I knew going to them wouldn't be of any help (my opinion).
Anyway, I called GVP in Philadelphia (suggestion GVP, get an 800- number) and
spoke with Rod in Tech Support (BTW, got through the first time). My
description of the problem was something he wasn't sure he had encountered in
his experience there, but he was aware of a firmware chip upgrade and said he
would send it to me. This was October 18.
It is now October 27, I get a UPS 2nd-day air package with the new ROM chip
and a quick scribbled drawing of where to install it. The install was done on
the morning of October 28. It was done easily. The point is, for now at least,
my drive is working correctly, albeit that my drive is perfing a little slower
than before (200k read, 85k write) but that might be due to disk fragmentation
over time.
The bottom line is, if you have one of the Quantum drives (any size) and it
begins to act funny after using it for some time, consider getting a firmware
ROM upgrade (it's for the drive itself, not the controller!) from your drive
purchase/manufacture source.
Larry Greenwald
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