[comp.sys.mac.programmer] Jasmine Direct Drive 140 Problems

beard@ux1.lbl.gov (Patrick C Beard) (08/30/88)

(I am posting this for a friend.)

I've experienced problems with my brand new Jasmine Direct Drive 140
and I wondered if anybody else has seen anything similar.  (It's a new
product.)  I enclose a paraphrase of my letter to Jasmine.

Problems:
1) Frequent system crashes with ID=28 (stack collision with heap).  These
crashes seem to be associated with disk accesses: while redrawing the 
desktop after a screen saver quits; while launching Microsoft Word; 
while running the TOPS Installer program; while copying a significant
number of files from one place to another on the disk; always while 
attempting a backup of the hard disk to tape over TOPS.  I had none 
of these crashes before installing this disk.  The crashes persist 
after installation of a clean system (fresh System and Finder, no 
INITs, no MultiFinder), which makes me suspect the driver software.

2) Very frequently (though not every time) these dirty restarts trash 
the hard diskTs driver.  (On restart, I get a happy mac who sits there 
for a minute or so while the disk accesses; then I get a flashing 
disk-question mark icon, indicating no boot disk is present.)  Restoring
the driver with the Jasmine program allows a successful reboot.

3) Inspection of the media (using the Jasmine program) after these 
dirty restarts frequently (though not every time) has yielded 
additional bad sectors.  These are now thirty in number, 16 of which 
were found after the last replacement of the driver.  Jasmine's Tech
Support people tell me that this is an unusually large number and 
have asked me to return the drive.

4) A bad software interaction with General Computer's HyperTape INIT.  
This is an INIT/Driver for GCC's 40 Mb tape backup unit.  The result 
is that I am unable to mount our backup device on the same Mac as the 
Direct Drive.

5) As a result of (4) and (1), I have been unable to back up the 
contents of the hard disk!!!  

Removal of a 40Mb partition created with HD Partition seemed to make 
the crashes less frequent, but they still occur.

I have read reports on Usenet that large (>70 Mb) Cirrus drives made 
by LaCie exhibit this problem of trashing the driver during a dirty
reboot.  They claim that this is the result of a bug in the Finder 
and is not their fault.   (I am using Finder 6.0 and System 4.2.) 
Jasmine may want to consult with them and with Apple on this.  The 
ID=28 bombs, however, smell to me very much like a Driver bug.

Please respond via E-mail to the address below rather than to this net.

				James Eastman
				eastman@lbl.gov
				MS 50-137
				Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
				Berkeley, CA 94720
				(415) 486-6916