kawakami@ocf.berkeley.edu (John Kawakami) (09/06/90)
A story about my GCR and hard drive
[Cloyne Court is a university student housing co-op. Spectre is a Mac
emulator.]
Two days ago I moved my computer from my old room, in the sunny west wing of
Cloyne Court, over to my new room, an almost spacious double in the east wing.
I anticipated that I'd move in and debug the program I maintain and call my
employer to tell him the good (though overdue) news.
At this point, I should point out that I'm not maintaing ST programs; I've got
a Spectre GCR and earn the money in Mac mode. I should also point out that I
have a hard drive: a necessity in both mac and ST mode. The ST is pretty
remarkable and I appreciate the speed increase: compiles which take 30
minutes on a Mac with a hard drive take only 10 minutes on the ST. But
sometimes I wish the Spectre and I had never met.
If we go back into the past about two months you'd see me agonizing over
bad writes on a Teac drive. The Teac floppy works fine and fast with
regular ST format (aka IBM or Sony format) but it dies all over the place
in GCR mode. I had the drive connected to the ST directly: I got the
drive at the computer store and I stuck the bare thing into my hard drive
case and snaked a cable from it to the ST. I don't know what it was but it
refused to write to GCR disks with any accuracy. This all cleared up when
I bought a second disk drive. I don't know if it's the mechanism in the
external (a BeaST FD Cub: very quiet) or if it's the signal amplifier
in that drive or if the GCR is supposed to have a stronger signal or what,
but the problem vanished. So did my money. On the other hand, I have
two drives; two drives is some unwritten prerequisite for MacUsage. I
try to be contemplative and regard this as partial payment for my hacker-
like habits of cutting corners and getting away with building a lot of
my own hardware.
The other homebuilt thing I have is my hard drive. It's a (cheap) Seagate
157N mounted in a PC case. That PC case has lots of spare room and I'll
probably shove a PC mutha' bore in it some day, but until then I have to tell
people that it's just my hard drive case (which still impresses lots of
students and gives me an artificial ego boost.) Like every thing I own, the
drive has given me some heartache. But so far, nothing has topped the
nefarious combo of the Spectre WITH the hard drive.
For some reason or other, the Spectre is not very tolerant of semi-flaky hard
drives. Errors which the ST cannot detect show up in Mac mode. When I
changed rooms, the hard drive got jostled around a lot, but not bumped and
banged to the point where I lost any data. But in Mac mode, the machine
started crashing and kept on crashing. I figured it was a sick "System" or
something so I thought I'd whip out my backups (thank Ghod for those!) and
everything would be hunky dory. Of course, in the process of moving, I'd
misplace/lose my most important posessions: Hard drive backups, X-acto knife,
plastic space-people figures, and my GCR manual. So I went around posting
posters proclaiming "LOST! One box with red diskettes and other stuff. I need
this back." The day went by and I was feeling truly bummed out of my video
etched brain. I had seen more "system error"s and "bombs" than any one user
should be allowed to witness lest she or he be turned off computers for life:
all computers Nintendo not excepted. But that evening a miracle occured. The
neo-deadhead who moved into my old room found the diskettes and gave them to
me. I offered him a beer but he refused; he even told me he made a long
distance call on my old account and would pay me for it. For a moment I
thought I had seen his Rasta-cap turn into a rainbow halo with Jerry Garcia's
head popping out of it. I swear it.
I set my butt down in front of the computer to restore it's health. The same
old sequence: load Spectre.prg, re-init the Spectre partitions, reinstall the
backups, and finally reboot. So far so good: no disk errors. But before I
can say "SCSI-Interface-and-thank-you-jerry" the system bombs. After several
repetitions of this song-and-dance I decide to lose my mind. I guess that
it's time for a full re-format of the drive. After all, what have I got to
lose? My sanity is already gone.
So, to make a long story less long, the re-format fixed everything up.
The End.
-
Remember, if you have a problem with hard disks and the GCR, re-format
your hard disk. It's a pain to restore, but there's no other way out.
John Kawakami kawakami@ocf.berkeley.edu
ucbvax!ocf.berkeley.edu!kawakami
Amateur crank! My Atari Macks!