espen@well.UUCP (Peter Espen) (10/12/89)
Well, last night my Mac IIcx (9 days out of the Apple 90 day warranty) started acting up. It turns out that I've been hit by the infamous 80 Meg Quantum drive problem. The drive started freezing up in mid-operation, would not boot about 75% of the time, and generally started to flake out. This is a tramatic thing to happen. Luckily I am backed up fairly and won't loose any important files. This week's issue of MacWeek has a front page article describing Apple's new policy for dealing with this problem. According to the article, Quantum has released a new PROM for the drive's controller board that issues a higher level of torque to the head mechanism and issue's a "full stroke command between seeks". I am a bit skeptical about whether this a REAL solution to the problem, or just a temp fix to a long range problem. I am also wondering if this will slow down the overall performance of the drive. With this new article in hand, I took my IIcx to a local S.F. Bay Area dealer today. I was told that since the IIcx is out of warranty, I would need to pay a labor charge of $60 to "evaluate" the problem and that if it was determined that this was a problem with the Quantum's PROM, then the new PROMs that this dealer expected to get in four days, would be installed on my drive. I was also told that if there was some "other" problem with the drive, I would have to pay for a new hard drive. Because I was a little nervous about what the Apple dealer was telling me, I called Apple Customer Relations in Cupertino. I was put on hold for about 10 minutes and was finally answered by a very friendly an helpful man, who told me that he would call this dealer for me and explain that this problem would be fixed at no charge per Apple's new commitment to extend the warranty of the Quantum drives in out-of warranty Macs. I'll let you all know what happens! Peter Espen espen@well