[comp.sys.atari.st] Floppy Drive Problems?

Mark@sersun2.essex.ac.uk (Foster M) (11/27/89)

Greetings Programs,

I was wondering if any of you kind folk could help with a problem that
I appear to have on my ST (I think it's an '87, rev. D 520). It's had
a memory upgrade to 1 Meg. and the original 360k drive has been replaced
with an NEC 720k device. The second drive is a 5.25" 40/80 track Power
Computing device.

The problem is this, if I boot from my usual boot disk, which brings up
my usual GEM environment, the system refuses to see drive B. It will
format drive B, and you can open it, but all you see is `0 bytes in 0
items' irrespective of what's on the drive. Also if you try and copy a
file from A to B a dialogue box pops up with, `This application cannot
find the file or folder you just tried to access.'

Booting with a different disk appears to cure the problem, but, if I run
Quikdex, drive B is only operating at 49% of what it should, normally I
would expect to see 97%. (Drive A is behaving perfectly during all this
BTW.) The other devation is the DMA test, which says B is operating at
197%, against the norm of 98%.

What's going on? Which bit of the system is cracking up? Do I send away
the floppy or is the controller getting flaky?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Mark Foster.

krs@stag.UUCP (Kent Schumacher) (12/03/89)

[Mark@sersun2.essex.ac.uk	 (Foster M) writes...]
> Greetings Programs,
>
(*blush*, I've never been called a program before...)
>
> [... some intro and background deleted ...]
> 
> The problem is this, if I boot from my usual boot disk, which brings up
> my usual GEM environment, the system refuses to see drive B. It will
> format drive B, and you can open it, but all you see is `0 bytes in 0
> items' irrespective of what's on the drive. Also if you try and copy a
> file from A to B a dialogue box pops up with, `This application cannot
> find the file or folder you just tried to access.'
> 
> Booting with a different disk appears to cure the problem, but, if I run
> Quikdex, drive B is only operating at 49% of what it should, normally I
> would expect to see 97%. (Drive A is behaving perfectly during all this
> BTW.) The other devation is the DMA test, which says B is operating at
> 197%, against the norm of 98%.
> 
> [... standard request for help hacked away ...]
>
> Mark Foster.

This is kind of a simplistic solution, but...

Most 5-1/4" floppy drives need their seek rate set to 6ms.  This is done
(usually) with an auto-file program.  Is it possible that your normal boot
disk is missing the seek-rate setting program?



  - Kent Schumacher               It's...   
    ardvar!krs@stag.UUCP             
    GEnie: K.SCHUMACHE1