beard@ux1.lbl.gov (Patrick C Beard) (08/30/88)
(I'm sending this for a friend.) I've experienced problems with my brand new Jasmine Direct Drive 140 and I wondered if anybody else has seen anything similar. (It's a new product.) I enclose a paraphrase of my letter to Jasmine. Problems: 1) Frequent system crashes with ID=28 (stack collision with heap). These crashes seem to be associated with disk accesses: while redrawing the desktop after a screen saver quits; while launching Microsoft Word; while running the TOPS Installer program; while copying a significant number of files from one place to another on the disk; always while attempting a backup of the hard disk to tape over TOPS. I had none of these crashes before installing this disk. The crashes persist after installation of a clean system (fresh System and Finder, no INITs, no MultiFinder), which makes me suspect the driver software. 2) Very frequently (though not every time) these dirty restarts trash the hard diskTs driver. (On restart, I get a happy mac who sits there for a minute or so while the disk accesses; then I get a flashing disk-question mark icon, indicating no boot disk is present.) Restoring the driver with the Jasmine program allows a successful reboot. 3) Inspection of the media (using the Jasmine program) after these dirty restarts frequently (though not every time) has yielded additional bad sectors. These are now thirty in number, 16 of which were found after the last replacement of the driver. Jasmine's Tech Support people tell me that this is an unusually large number and have asked me to return the drive. 4) A bad software interaction with General Computer's HyperTape INIT. This is an INIT/Driver for GCC's 40 Mb tape backup unit. The result is that I am unable to mount our backup device on the same Mac as the Direct Drive. 5) As a result of (4) and (1), I have been unable to back up the contents of the hard disk!!! Removal of a 40Mb partition created with HD Partition seemed to make the crashes less frequent, but they still occur. I have read reports on Usenet that large (>70 Mb) Cirrus drives made by LaCie exhibit this problem of trashing the driver during a dirty reboot. They claim that this is the result of a bug in the Finder and is not their fault. (I am using Finder 6.0 and System 4.2.) Jasmine may want to consult with them and with Apple on this. The ID=28 bombs, however, smell to me very much like a Driver bug. Please respond via E-mail to the address below rather than to this net. James Eastman eastman@lbl.gov MS 50-137 Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Berkeley, CA 94720 (415) 486-6916