MFAGKCHR@HMARL5.BITNET (04/09/90)
What I found out about the FAT problems up to now.
Problems are known to occur in at least 3 machines. All of them after
TOS 1.4 was installed. (One machine had not been used with old ROMs).
In 2 cases the ROMs were dutch, in one case US.
The symptoms are: - lost and cross-linked clusters on the harddisk.
- FAT comparison from dlii or SED (diskeditor from
the german `kleisterscheibe' do not give
reproducible results. (I.e. the FATs are indicated
to be different SOMETIMES).
I think wrong reading of the FAT would be enough to explain the problem.
But why are the FATs read wrong?
Problems stop if harddisk is used with another ST (with TOS 1.2). Thus the
problem is not caused by an error in the harddisk itself.
Harddisks all were original atari disks. Formatted with HDX and used
with AHDI in 2 cases (don't know what version), partitioned with
SED and used with CBHD in 1 case. The problem does not seem to
be related with any program used.
It was suggested that a weak driver chip could cause the problem.
I did forward the idea to my dealer, he does say he installed the ROMs as
Atari told him to (I don't know whether that means that these chips are
changed). Could such a chip really cause the problems indicated here?
I did test the ROMs as far as possible. I wrote a little program that
reads the ROMs 1000 times and compares the results with what it finds the
first time. No errors. Thus reading of the ROMs seems to be reproducible.
(This program also calculates a checksum. I would be happy to send it
to anyone. I would like to know the checksum somebody else finds with dutch
ROMs).
Up to now nobody has told me he is using dutch ROMs without problems
(which does NOT mean that they are bad, just that they can be bad).
It would be nice if some people would want to test dlii's disk check
repeatedly. I would like to know whether the problem with sometimes (say 1 in
5-10 checks) wrong FAT reads occurs with others to. Do not use a cache program
if you test this. The FATs should really be read again.
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Dept. of Occup. & Chris Evelo
Environm. Health MFAGKCHR@HMARL5 (BITNET)
and Toxicology.
University of Limburg Tel: 31-43-888635
P.O. Box 616 Fax: 31-43-436080
6200 MD Maastricht
The Netherlands
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