jamesl@CIE.UOREGON.EDU (09/29/90)
Hi. I'd like to thank everybody who sent me sugestions and information on my disk drive problems. In short, the drive was scrambling files at random opn my disks. My final solution was to trade in for a new built-in drive at my local Atari dealer. End of problem, right? I'm not so sure... My new disk drive is still having problems with disks, but they're not the same problems. Some disks are now unreadable, and cannot be formatted. How is it possible for a disk drive to damage a disk this way? Some files are damaged in such a way that I can copy them from drive to a ramdisk, but only part of the file gets copied. One file I copied six times, and each time got a different byte count on my destination drive (the ramdisk). Yet, the computer carried out the copy as if everything was fine with no error messages, which has never happened to me before. A couple disks which have *never* been placed in my old drive without write protection now have damaged files. I've lost all of my copies of Interlink this way. Could my old drive have damaged a write-protected disk? Finally, I used the check disk feature of Hypercopy on some of these suspect disks, and, when I can get past the "Disk A: may be damaged" error flag, am told that these disks have damaged FAT sectors. I have a couple of questions that I hope somebody out there has the time to answer... Could a disk with defective heads have caused all this damage? Or might the new disk be having problems? Could the problem reside, not in the disk itself, but in one of the chips controlling the disk I/O? Once the chips in the case worked loose and I had to open it up and physically push them back down (don't worry, I was grounded) before the computer wopuld recognize the disk drive. Are there any programs in the FTP sites that would give me a detailed examination of my disks and tell me what is wrong? If it's damage from the old drive, I'd like to isolate the bad disks so I may deal with them. Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to listen to me, and I hope somebody knows something that might help me get a handle on this %$#*!! problem... James Charles Lynn ------------------ jamesl@cie.uoregon.edu "All flames considered on basis of merit (i.e. ignored)"