PHILIP@VTVM1.BITNET (Fred Senese) (01/05/89)
To: comp-sys-amiga@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
Help!
After a few months of fairly trouble-free operation I am having
problems with my hard drive. I didn't move the drive at all.
1) The drive won't spin up consistently. When it is stuck I can get it to
spin up by *carefully* tweaking the spindle with a screwdriver.
2) The drive will run for several hours or days but eventually gives
lots of read-write errors (and executables on the drive aren't recognized
as object modules.) A file that is corrupt one day is OK the next. The
Find Bad Blocks command in MDFixer reports different positions and numbers of
bad blocks every time it is run. I can on occasion find only 4 bad blocks
on the last few cylinders of the disk (exactly what I found before the drive
got sick) but at other times I get around 200 bad blocks. The drive fails
at different times in the startup-sequence.
My configuration: A1000 w/2M Starboard II, Stardrive, attached to an ST157N
in a Wetex case & power supply with a heavily shielded cable. I haven't done
the PAL fix. I am running KS/WB 1.3. The drive is hard-formatted with
interleave 4, and I use the following mountlist:
DH0: Device = StarDrive.device
FileSystem = l:FastFileSystem
GlobVec = -1
DOSType = 0x444f5301
Unit = 0
Flags = 0x3030
Mount = 1
Surfaces = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 155
Priority = 0
Reserved = 2
Interleave = 0
LowCyl = 1 ; HighCyl = 350
Buffers = 30
BufMemType = 0
#
with other partitions at 351-550 and 551-612.
I've tried:
1)reseating the Starboard II, the DB25 pin cable from the Stardrive
to the case, and my homemade 50 pin SCSI->25 pin MAC cable. I rang out the
cables. I swapped all cables with those from a friend's StarDrive setup.
2)checking the Wetex switching power supply. I got 4.8 and 11V
rather than 5 and 12V. My friend's linear power supply didn't work
either.
3)I replaced the DB-25 connectors on the Wetex case.
Any advice you can offer will be *greatly* appreciated.