[comp.sys.amiga] drive probs

rdodds@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu (07/30/88)

  I have just recently purchased an Amiga 500 and have had
a few problems with the internal drive.  At first the drive
seemed misaligned, so I brought it in to my local amiga
store to have the drive aligned. After bringing it home, 
I put in my copy of my workbench and it had a read error.
These read errors seemed to spread to a few of my other disks.
I decided to bring my A500 and external drive in
again to have them fully checked out.  They both passed.
So I got a new copy of workbench and checked out all my disks
with diskdoctor to see if they had any hard errors.  My
original workbench disk had 10 hard errors.
Later I tried to boot up my new workbench again and ONCE
AGAIN I GOT READ ERRORS!!!  I, being very annoyed at this time,
reformated my original workbench and used diskdoctor on
it one more time.  This time it checked out to have NO
hard errors!  Do I have some sort of virus or is my drive
trashing my disks?

Please respond by e-mail to sdamberger@civilgate.ce.uiuc.edu.

kevin_lee_smathers@cup.portal.com (08/01/88)

>
>  I have just recently purchased an Amiga 500 and have had
>a few problems with the internal drive.  At first the drive
>seemed misaligned, so I brought it in to my local amiga

	There are two likely reasons for floppy drive problems
on an A500.  The first is dirty power.  If the second possible
failure doesn't pan out, try getting a UPS or a line filter.
	Alternatively, several people have noticed that their
A500's came in with the Fat Agnes chip set only marginally well 
seated.  Since those chips (the blitter in particular) are   
responsible for disk reads and writes, I would recommend pulling
and reseating the fat agnes (or just pushing down on it to 
ensure that it is making good contact.)  If you do pull the chip
you may want to dab some contact cleaner on each of the pins.  
Hope that this helps.  Together these two problems have been 
responsible for for the majority of problems that users have been
experiencing with the A500. -kls

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Kevin Smathers has known it all since his birth in the middle
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charles@hpcvca.HP.COM (Charles Brown) (08/02/88)

>At first the drive seemed misaligned, so I brought it in to my local
>amiga store to have the drive aligned. After bringing it home, 
>I put in my copy of my workbench and it had a read error.
>These read errors seemed to spread to a few of my other disks.
>I decided to bring my A500 and external drive in
>again to have them fully checked out.  They both passed.

If a disk is written with a drive which is out of alignment, the data
may not be readable to a drive which is in alignment.  Naturally, if
you align your drive any disks which were written before the align
will become hard to read.

>I, being very annoyed at this time, reformated my original workbench
>and used diskdoctor on it one more time.  This time it checked out to
>have NO hard errors!  Do I have some sort of virus or is my drive
>trashing my disks?

You reformatted the original workbench as created by C/A?  Or you
reformatted the workbench which you copied from a C/A disk using your
out-of-alignment drive?  After you formatted the disk it no longer has
workbench or anything else on it.  Naturally diskdocter will find no
problems.

>Please respond by e-mail to sdamberger@civilgate.ce.uiuc.edu.

Sorry.  This site is poorly administered and has problems with
addresses such as your.
	Charles Brown	charles%hpcvca@hplabs.hp.com
These are my opinions and not my employers.