samia@violet.berkeley.edu (Samia Benidir) (08/15/89)
To the Mac netters, PLEASE HELP!!!! I have a Mac II with a 40Mb drive that worked perfectly for one year; but a week ago it started giving me lots of hardware problems with the drives. I would appreciate any comments/suggestions about the following: A Sony floppy disk got stuck in the Sony internal drive. A friend, who was using the Mac, used the tip of a metal paper clip to eject the disk, then she forced the disk out. The drive became noisy, and would not acknowledge the new disks we tried to read. I took the system unit for repair; the Apple technician said he found the spring of the floppy disk inside the mechanism of the drive, and the head was bent from forcing the disk out. He repaired it, but warned me that the drive won't last too long. I took the Mac II home, and worked with it for a few hours. I needed to copy my work on a floppy to laser print it elsewhere. It worked fine; I turned the Mac off; one day later, I turned it on, but nothing happened; just the question mark; this time the hard disk crashed, according to the technician. The system was making the same cranky noise as when the floppy drive was sick. The hard drive was replaced; (it was an 1988 drive, not one of the 1987 bad drives that Apple was replacing without charge). I go back home with my system with a brand new hard drive. Same as last time, I work with the Mac after installing all the software, try to copy my work on the floppy drive, but it won't "see" the different disks I tried. Then a disk got stuck again. The technician could get it out, and save work on it. After checking that everything works fine, I carefully transport to my home (3 blocks from the repair shop) the system unit in its box, I plug it and turn it on; nothing happens. The new hard disk has also crashed, the technician said. He is replacing it and running extended diagnostic programs on the system unit. He said he never had such a case; he doesn't know why the drives keep crashing. Please, let me know if you have any suggestions, if you heard of such problems, etc... Please send messages to samia@violet.Berkeley.EDU I will post a summary of suggestions and follow ups. Thank you Samia