frank@altera.UUCP (Frank Heile) (12/30/87)
A friend has bought a Miniscribe 3650 (40 MB Hard Disk) by mailorder and an A2090 Hard disk controller from Commodore. We installed it in a Amiga 2000. I helped him install it and we ended up with one workbench disk that would boot and mount the hard disk. We copied files to hard disk and it DEFINITELY was working. A few days later the workbench disk "went bad", and my friend tried to resurrect the workbench disk and hard disk to no avail. I later went over and helped him and we could not get the hard disk "prep"ed. We went thru all the same steps we went thru the first time we installed it but every time we ran the "prep" program - the disk light comes on for a few flashes and then the prep program says "Disk NOT prepped" (approximate from my memory). And so of course format doesn't work and we can't use the hard disk. My current suspicion is a hardware problem of some type since we went thru the same software steps that we went thru the first time. He has NOT changed any cabling or even touched the A2090/Miniscribe since these difficulties started. Any suggestions? What could cause the "Disk NOT prepped" error message? (To Commodore: Could you be a little more informative with the error message other than "Disk NOT prepped"?) P.S. The disk only had a 30 day guarantee which has now expired. ------------ Also When we had it working we also noticed the 10-15 second "stepping" noise from the disk when the binddrivers command was executed in the startup-sequence ONLY WHEN THE SYSTEM WAS WARM BOOTED (some other poster here recently mentioned this first). When coming up from power off no noise, when reset with Cntrl - A - A it would emit a 10-15 second noise which sounded like the disk was stepping to and stopping at EVERY one of the 808 tracks. Does anyone know why that happens - is it a feature or a flaw? ------------ Thanks for all help mailed to: ...!pyramid!altera!frank