mlewis@unocss.UUCP (Marcus S. Lewis) (06/27/89)
Once again, I need help figuring our what is wrong with my Z.
I backed the motherboard mods out and put the UCI 512K board back in
and still have problems. I no longer get random "parity or buss errors",
all I get is nothing. CHKDSK has recently begun to report that my hard
drive is a probable non-dos disk, CED has begun to vanish any time I
interrupt any i/o with ^C. And occasionally, the machine goes away.
Rebooting always fixes it. The last straw came last night when CHKDSK
refused to output anything and refused to give the keyboard back. I
reformatted (again) and reloaded, then tried to run CONFIGUR. Everything
went smoothly until I told it to write to memory and disk, and it wiped
out my system tracks. On a related note, about three reformats ago, I
had problems with mkdir, which would hang and leave me with a link to \,
which gave CHKDSK fits, and which I could not rename, delete, or anything.
This is getting to be a tidge annoying. I had decided I had a corrupted
OS, so reloaded from original disks, same problems, except now I have to
reformat tonite. HELP! What's this monster doing? (BTW I am operating
off the HD now, I just had to boot from floppy.)
Gern, your offer of a new MB is sorely tempting, but I need to find truly
gainful employment before I can spare that much cash. I hope you still
have it when I can afford to make an offer.
Marc Lewis
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------alpope@token.Sun.COM (Alan Pope) (06/29/89)
Most of your problems sound disk related. This is a guess but thought I might pass it on. I had a real flakey system about two years ago (it was actually an IBM AT at work). I started to think that the metal oxides on the hard disk were flaking off. Things would disappear from disk, sometimes returning. Programs would hang suddenly (I decided they were badly loaded copies). Chkdsk would find ever increasing quantities of bad sectors, the system tracks would come and go so that sometimes it would boot other times it was a non-dos disk and other times I could only find the root directory. Sound familiar? I thought some of it sounded the same which is why I'm venturing a guess. It turned out that when I slid the AT's cover back on, the top part of the cabinet bumped the data separator cable causing imperfect connection on a couple of pins. After pulling the cable off and putting it back on firmly, the weirdness went away. What I'm guessing is that you probably have checked the cable placement but you might want to mosy down to Radio Shack and pick up a new ribbon cable to try instead of your current cable. The current ribbon may have a break that only has partial contact. Oh well, it's only a guess. Alan L. Pope alpope@sun.com