tj@cis.ohio-state.edu (Todd R. Johnson) (08/13/89)
I recently installed a Hardframe and Quantum 80S in my 2000 and am experiencing strange problems. Everything seems to work fine except hack lite and ghostscript. Whenever I try to load these programs I get a ``volume has a read/write error'' message. Other programs work fine. I've run Lattice 5.02 with the optimizer, Moria, diskperf, etc. with absolutely no problems. Repeatedly clicking on ``retry'' at the read/write error eventually results in the program loading and running just fine. To make matters worse, if I copy hack or gs to another partition or to a different file on the same partition, the read/write error still occurs with the copy. If I copy the programs to floppy, they load without error. In addition, I also get the read/write error while copying the files, but not while typeing the files. So copy gs ram:gs gives the error, while type >ram:gs gs works flawlessly. I'm running on a 2000 with 1.3 roms, 1 meg ram, and 512K Agnus. I usually run virusx, dmouse, ff, and Arp 1.3. I'm also overscanned to the max. I've tried eliminating each of these programs with no luck. I've also tried booting with a vanilla workbench disk --- still no luck. Adding 20 buffers (on top of the 20 that I get by default) seems to allow me to load gs twice before it errors on the third load. After the error, doing a lot of disk activity on other files will sometimes allow gs to properly load once or twice more. I have partitioned the 80S into a 60 meg and a 21 meg partition. I used 739 cylinders, 6 surfaces, 37 sectors/track to do this. I have buffmemtype set to 5. I used the defaults for everything else. The total number of available sectors (as reported by info) when added to the rigid disk block and partition reserved sectors works out to exactly 164,058, which is supposed to be the usable sectors on the 80S. Frankly, I'm stumped. The documentation (if you want to call it that) supplied by Microbotics is of little help. The only other options that I know of are to 1) reseat the hardframe, and/or 2) backup and reformat the drive as a single partition using all of Microbotics defaults. Unfortunately, I think Microbotics defaults will result in 834 sectors too many. These are the sectors that the 80S uses for defect management. Speaking of defect management: how and when do bad sectors get mapped out? I know the drive is supposed to handle this, but the partitioning software needs to be told (essentialy) the number of sectors to use. If there are bad sectors, this should decrease the total number of usable sectors. I would appreciate any help or suggestions on this. In particular, it might be useful to know how others have set up this comibination on their machines. ---Todd tj@cis.ohio-state.edu
jms@tardis.Tymnet.COM (Joe Smith) (08/13/89)
In article <57456@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> tj@cis.ohio-state.edu (Todd R. Johnson) writes: > I recently installed a Hardframe and Quantum 80S in my 2000 >and am experiencing strange problems. Everything seems to work fine >except hack lite and ghostscript. Whenever I try to load these >programs I get a ``volume has a read/write error'' message. > To make matters worse, if >I copy hack or gs to another partition or to a different file on the >same partition, the read/write error still occurs with the copy. How many bytes long is hack lite? How many bytes long is ghostscript? How many bytes is MAXTRANSFER set to in your mountlist? Does the problem go away if MAXTRANSFER is set to a small value, such as 1024 bytes? All your symptoms match the symptoms one would expect from a read error caused by a faulty disk driver trying to transfer more data than it can handle. That's why Commodore invented the MAXTRANSFER kludge. -- Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | SMTP: JMS@F74.TYMNET.COM or jms@tymix.tymnet.com McDonnell Douglas FSCO | UUCP: ...!{ames,pyramid}!oliveb!tymix!tardis!jms PO Box 49019, MS-D21 | PDP-10 support: My car's license plate is "POPJ P," San Jose, CA 95161-9019 | narrator.device: "I didn't say that, my Amiga did!"
tj@shawnee.cis.ohio-state.edu (Todd R. Johnson) (08/14/89)
After receiving two suggestions to lower MaxTransfer, I lowered it from 131072 to 130560 and the problems went away. ---Todd tj@cis.ohio-state.edu -=- ---Todd tj@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu