aff@hamlet.cs.duke.edu (Amr F. Fahmy) (07/13/88)
In regard to a recent posting about the LaCie 80 meg hard drive, I would like to say that I also have the same problems with the internal drive on the Mac II. The drive is really fast and everything about it is great except if a (most) program crashes. The machine would not boot from the drive. I boot from a floppy, run Silverlining and then Disk First Aid, as described in the article about 2 days ago (sorry I lost the article), and everything would be just fine. On calling LaCie, they said that they cannot reproduce the problem but they are working on a fix ! Sounds contradicting to me how can they fix the problem if they cannot reproduce it ? They also said that the most recent version of Silverlining (4.06 or 4.07) might fix the problem but they have no proof. Mean while I try new programs with the HD unmounted. Does anybody out there know if this problem is fixable ? Or am I going to have to live with it. Is LaCie on the net ? Amr F. Fahmy, Dept. of Computer Science, Duke University Durham, NC 27706-2591. Phone (919) 684-5110 (ext.248) CSNET: aff@duke UUCP: ...!decvax!duke!aff ARPA: aff%duke@csnet-relay
dumesny@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Alain Dumesny) (07/14/88)
In article <12021@duke.cs.duke.edu> aff@hamlet.cs.duke.edu (Amr F. Fahmy) writes: >In regard to a recent posting about the LaCie 80 meg hard drive, I would like >to say that I also have the same problems with the internal drive on the >Mac II. >The drive is really fast and everything about it is great except >if a (most) program crashes. The machine would not boot from the drive. There is a known "problem" on the macII. When you get a bad crash, the PRAM (Parameter ram) get erased and then the macII doesn't know anymore what is attached to it, therefore harddrives won't boot up anymore. I have an init called "INIT PramFix" which is suppose to fix that problem. If you want a copy of it just let me know (it's only 1K) and that should fix the problem you are describing. Hope this helped, Alain Dumesny----
brewer@clio.las.uiuc.edu (07/15/88)
No!!!! PRAM is _NOT_ I repeat not the problem. I know about the PRAM thing, and
this is not it (anyway, I am running System 6.0, and it has the PRAM Fix INIT
incorporated in it. The problem here is that the guy who wrote the driver has
severe brain damage. This is such a completely obvious bug that anyone could
have found with a day or two's testing. It occurs on all flavors of Macs, even
further proof that it is not PRAM. I doubt LaCie is on the net, or they would
have responded to my flame already. Anyway if they are on the net, they
shouldn't be! They should be busy re-writing the driver so it works!!!
Oh yeah, a developer friend of mine also has a LaCie 80. Since trashing your
drive everytime you get a severe bomb is not conductive to development, he
called LaCie and gave them a (rightly deserved) hard time. They said that they
had gotten some reports about that, but couldn't reproduce it. That is the
lamest excuse for an answer I have ever heard. All you have to do it push the
reset switch and your drive is toast (temporarily)!! But, they said they had a
new version of the driver that disables the drive's RAM cache (the area in
which I hypothosized the problem lay), and so would fix it. They said they
would ship it to all customers soon. He said he wanted it FedEx'ed, so they
did. It didn't work.
And finally, I called them yesterday to see where the heck my manual and
SilverServer were. They said they had just received there shipments, and that
they had 300 backorders. Give it two weeks they said. Grrrr.
Robert Brewer
brewer@clio.las.uiuc.edu
{ihnp4 | convex | pur-ee}!uiucuxc!clio!brewer