djs@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (David J. Sturman) (02/10/88)
I had a really bad experience with my SE HD-20 the other day. I was using LSC version 2.15 (running System 6.0/Finder 4.2). Since I don't have enough memory to run LSC under Multifinder I was using switcher (version 5.1a13 I think). I was trying to save a file when I got a file error. The program was still running, so I tried again. File error. I removed the line of code I just added and tried the write again. It worked. I added the code back in and the write didn't work. When I tried to exit LSC the whole thing bombed. On rebooting the machine could not find my hard disk. In fact, no program could read the hard disk. I tried Fedit+, Disk Check, the disk repair application from APPLE, DiskExpress, and others. None could mount the disk. The HDinit program from Apple could mount the disk, but not read from it. Since I had backups of most of my stuff, I reformatted the disk, and ran all of DiskExpress' diagnostics on it. To my consternation there was only 19,100k available on the newly re-formatted, empty disk! That's almost a megabyte lost! Where is it? Could it be that 5% of my disk is bad blocks? Does anyone know how to verify this? The disk is only 4 months old. Has anyone had this problem before? I have lots of INITS that I have been using for a while. Could one of these be causing a problem? Could it have been switcher with the new system? A little later I was using a program DiskCat which catalogs disks as you shove them into the drive. After about 40 disks the program just spit them out again w/o reading them. I had to reboot. I had another instance where the machine froze and did not recognize the HD on boot. That time, turning off the machine, waiting a few seconds and then re-booting solved the problem. In all cases, just before the machine craps out I get unexpected activity on the disk, the red light blinks for a while on its own (I was not doing anything which should have required the disk). Sometimes the light goes out and I'm dead, sometimes it keeps blinking and I'm dead. My thoughts are that it might be something like SmartAlarms checking up on the time and writing into the wrong place, or some other background thing trashing my disk. Any ideas or similar instances? I'm almost afraid to use my machine for anything serious. Thanks in advance, David J. Sturman djs@gertie.media.mit.edu
tedj@hpcilzb.HP.COM (Ted Johnson) (02/11/88)
>consternation there was only 19,100k available on the newly >re-formatted, empty disk! That's almost a megabyte lost! Where is >it? Could it be that 5% of my disk is bad blocks? Does anyone know >how to verify this? The disk is only 4 months old. My SE HD20 only has 19,019k available (18.57 Meg). I think that part of the missing disk space is due to bad blocks, and part of it is be due to information that is stored onto the disk, but not in a file (e.g., the info. that gets returned when you do a PBHGetVInfo() call: name of disk, number of allocation blocks, size of allocation blocks, etc.). Since this information takes up space, maybe it is subtracted before the amount of space available is reported. But 1.5Meg is A LOT of space just for directory information.... It could also be the case that what Apple calls a 20 Meg hard disk really only holds 18.5 Meg.... You could also have a bad disk. Sad story ON (sob, sniff): June 1, '87 Bought a SE HD20 June 4, '87 Bad hard disk. Got a new SE HD20. August '87 Bad hard disk. Replaced it. Fan ate itself. Replaced whole analog board. Dec. '87 Hard disk started making HORRIBLE SCRAPING NOISES upon boot up. Sad story OFF. I think the next time the internal hard disk goes belly up, I'll just rip it out and install a Jasmine internal disk. -Ted
gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu (02/13/88)
Of all the parts in the generic PC, the hard disk is probably the
flakiest. Some brands of hard disk just break, and break, and break.
I have a friend who works for the largest drive manufacturer, and he
says the mechanical engineers are just astounded that their product's
low quality doesn't bankrupt the company.
I'd say anyone selling a PC with less than a 1-yr hard disk warranty
is a scoundrel trying to cheap its customers. I believe most drive
manufacturers (e.g. seagate, quantum, miniscribe, etc) warrant their
products for 1 year anyway.
So buy a hard disk with at least a 1-year warranty. Some companies
offer 2-yr and 5-year warranties. If they sell a drive that fits your
needs, it's probably well worth the extra money (if any).
Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
{gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu}