[comp.sys.amiga.tech] A500 Floppy Drive Weirdness

grh@cbnewsl.ATT.COM (george.r.heuer) (01/06/90)

Here's a challenge for you hardware guru's out there...

I recently convinced a fellow-employee that the computer he wanted for
his 5-year old to do music and paint software was an Amiga 500.  So he
enthusiastically ran out the day before Christmas and bought an A500
at one of the local computer stores.  The first disappointment occurred
when he plugged it in Christmas day and the power supply was dead.  But
a trip to the dealer the next day yielded a new one and he set out to
copy his workbench disks.  Since he had a single drive, he used the
duplicate option from the workbench and 50% of the time or more he got
a read/write error whenever he tried to write on the destination disk.
A trip back to the dealer was fruitless in that they were able to dup
a disk and they sent him away.  Anyway, back home again, the same thing
started to happen.  It seems that he can read disks OK but in the course
of duplicating disks or trying to read disks that he succesfully wrote,
he continues to get read/write errors.  I thought his internal drive might
be bad, so I loaned him my 1010 to see what happened, and he had exactly
the same problems with my good 1010.

Anyway, I have reasonable faith in this guy to believe that he's doing all
the right things, but is having some sort of hardware problem.  Now that
we've eliminated the internal drive itself as a possible source of the
problem, does anyone have an idea of what to suspect next?  He talked to
the dealer about checking this out, but they told him that he could take it
to a local warranty place and wait a couple of weeks or that if they looked
at it they'd charge him $60/hr if they didn't find anything wrong (This
doesn't seem right to me, but that's an issue for another post).  So he's
pretty much dead in the water for at least 2 weeks.  Anybody got any good
ideas of what's going on?

Randy Heuer
att!cbnewsl!grh

valentin@cbmvax.commodore.com (Valentin Pepelea) (01/06/90)

In article <3512@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> grh@cbnewsl.ATT.COM (george.r.heuer) writes:
>
>Here's a challenge for you hardware guru's out there...
>
>...It seems that he can read disks OK but in the course
>of duplicating disks or trying to read disks that he succesfully wrote,
>he continues to get read/write errors.  I thought his internal drive might
>be bad, so I loaned him my 1010 to see what happened, and he had exactly
>the same problems with my good 1010.

He has faulty disks. Bring some of your faithful disks which you have had no
trouble using during the last year and see how they fare. You might also try
using his troublesome disk on your machine to make sure it is at fault.

Valentin
-- 
The Goddess of democracy? "The tyrants     Name:    Valentin Pepelea
may distroy a statue,  but they cannot     Phone:   (215) 431-9327
kill a god."                               UseNet:  cbmvax!valentin@uunet.uu.net
             - Ancient Chinese Proverb     Claimer: I not Commodore spokesman be

iwood@uvicctr.UVic.CA.UUCP (Ian Wood) (01/09/90)

There is a problem with the DISKCOPY program on a whole whack of Workbench 1.3
disks that Commodore put out around Christmas.  As well as the write errors,
the bad diskcopy will sometimes guru.  Check the size of the DISKCOPY file.
If the file is 17380 bytes and the version is 1.3.1, it is the hooped version.
The guru problem only seems to come up from Workbench, not CLI.

A lot of the dealers around here didn't know about the problem.  The guys at
Moebius Computer Systems in Victoria found it and phoned Commodore, who didn't
know (I think).  But then Moebius is a real Amiga store, run by a bunch of
Amiga hackers who got into the retail business because they had a calling to
spread the word.....

Flame Retardent :  I don't work for Moebius or get consideration for my 
                   words here, etc, etc.



-- 
Ian Wood
Systems Operator                                UUCP   : iwood@uvicctr.uvic.ca
University of Victoria                          BITNET : CCIAN@UVVM
C eh N eh D eh                                           (It's a Sierra, Eric)

Disclaimer (noun) :
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