poole@forty2.UUCP (Simon Poole) (03/02/88)
THIS IS NOT A RUMOUR!
It has been brought to my attention that Atari has been manufacturing
ST's with a most serious flaw over the last few months (time span is not
exactlly known). The problem is that some of the drives (Chinon) do not
reckonize a change is the write protect status properly (or at least
do not generate the required signal correctly). This means naturally
that the OS doesn't know when a disk has been changed and will happily
right old disk info to the new disk, which will naturally ruin the contents
of the disk.
The problem seems to effect the whole ST range (Mega and 1040), not all
are bad, but even Atari doesn't seem to know exactly the extent of
the problem.
To see if your ST has the problem, do the following:
a) get two NOT write protected disks
b) insert disk and open window
c) swap disks and press the Escape key
repeat c) a few times, if your ST always reads from disk each time
you press Escape, you don't have the problem otherwise:
DON'T USE YOUR ST ANYMORE!
and get the drive swapped!
(If you have a harddisk, you can naturally still use your computer.)
Isn't it nice how Atari alerted us about this problem as soon as they
noticed it :-/.
Simon Poole
BITNET: K538915@CZHRZU1A
UUCP: ...mcvax!cernvax!forty2!poole
PS: Atari Switzerland was trying to cover this up: Bad luck boys! UD140469@NDSUVM1.BITNET (03/03/88)
[a line for the line eater]
Is there a more quantifiable method for testing for this problem? Since
getting my Mega in December I've had many (6-8) disks go bad for no obvious
reason. However, when I tried your swapped disk test, everything was okay.
A couple other reasons could be: I was reorganizing my disks and mearly
used some disks that hadn't been accessed in a long time (and might have gone
bad anytime--North Dakota is a dusty place even with disk boxes); my disks
might be just dirty. If either of these is the case, netland can't help me
much. Another possibility is the RAM disk I started using when I got my Mega--
it's a reconfigurable Ramdisk called Mikes Ram Disk, ver .95 from DClick
software. I have suspected it because on the boot sector of one of my disks
the word DCLICK appeared 6 or 7 bytes after the first--I wondered if the ram
disk handler might have done something funny in memory (although maybe that
disk was formatted with the DClick formatting program--would that have done
it?). Another possibility is disk speed--I noticed my older external 314 was
running at about 304 rpm--and it varied somewhat from that number. Could a
sudden change in rpm be the cause of my woes? My last guess (other than the
problem Simon mentioned) is that almost all of the disks that went bad were
single-sided disks (if I could tell what they were at all)--could the mechanism
in the Mega be pickier about formatting single-sided disks double sided? I'd
sure appreciate any help netters could give me--having one or two seemingly
good disks go suddenly bad (sometimes a bad sector, sometimes can't seem to
read it at all--maybe the directory?) almost every week is discouraging.
Thanks,
Scott Udell
UD140469@NDSUVM1.BITNET