$$$I$JV@NERVM.BITNET (William S. Kirchhoff) (02/17/89)
Now, I have an interesting problem for the net. My Rainbow 100B
has picked an interesting habit of not updating the harddisk. First,
swap the disks. Worked for awhile, but at the same time the old drive
was put into another Rainbow and worked flawlessly. Drive controller?
It was used on another Rainbow a few monthes ago and had no problems.
Next? Cleaned the power supply out (very carfully), and everything
worked fine for a week. The problems back, but if you do a little
shaking around the power cord and power supply, the problem goes
away.
I seem to remember somebody mentioning the chance of a power cord
going bad. Is this the external cord, or the internal ribbon? Has
anybody else experienced similar problems?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
: William S. Kirchhoff - North East Regional Data Center (904) 392-4601 :
: $$$i$jv@nervm.BITNET (CMS) wsk@beach.cis.ufl.EDU (Unix) :
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*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*rl1b+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Robert A. Locke") (02/17/89)
Bill,
Gawd, does this sound familiar. Let me guess, you are using MS-DOS and when
you go to use access the hard drive, the information on your hard disk is
worthless, either outdated or corrupted. Unfortunately for me it used to attack
directories (meaning massive failures of lots of files...).
Now, I suppose you want the solution... :-) Let's see, a few hundred
dollars in consulting fees ought to cover it.... :-)
Basically, I swapped both my hard disk controller and the cable going from
the hard disk to the controller. Voila. Two years and no problems. Now to be
honest with you, I don't think I needed to replace the controller but I had been
arguing with Field Service for three months over the damn thing.
The cables are prone to failure! The first revision of the cable could not
handle anything above the ten megabyte drive. Now it had nothing to do with the
capacity of the drive but rather the transfer rate of the data. The controller
had no problem handling it. The cable gave up because it was not well shielded
or simply poor cable. They came out with the new cable but I insist it is
borderline in quality. It was a newer revision one that failed on me after
about a year's use. If you have a dark grey cable, then that is an old one and
your culprit. Get a whitish colored one.
Now if you are not under service contract, you should get in touch with your
favorite Rainbow dealer. Try calling Mark Bornstein aka Mark Industries at
(617) 631-1030. He used to have some homemade cables that worked great but
could probably get you the real thing if you wanted.
--Rob Locke
List Maintainer
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