davidb@Pacer.UUCP (David Barts) (02/22/90)
We have an HP9122D floppy drive on an HP9000/370 running HP-UX (don't ask how come we have the HP-150 version of a floppy drive on the UNIX system - its a long story, but the drive works). About six months ago we started having problems with the unit writing unreadable floppies (the disks could be read on the 9122 but not on any other 3.5" drive). Prior to this problem, we had no trouble at all for several years. We have since retired the ailing 9122D from the HP-UX system and replaced it with another 9122D. This unit has worked fine for about 5 months, but recently it has occasionally started showing the same problem. Just today, it dawned on me that the problems started showing up (on the first drive) after we started using a program that waits for a floppy to be inserted by going into a read/sleep/seek to 0 loop until the read returns successfully. (The sleep period is about 15 seconds). I'm wondering if all those attempted reads to an empty floppy drive are hurting it. I have heard that PC's don't mind even if you change floppies while the busy light is on, so originally I thought that reads to an empty drive would be harmless. Now I'm not so sure. Please reply to me and I will summarize.-- David Barts Pacer Corporation davidb@pacer.uucp ...!uunet!pilchuck!pacer!davidb