greg@dekalb.UUCP (Greg Philmon) (05/19/89)
A client thinks he wants to equip their new PC Lab with IBM PS/2s. I've been
trying to talk them out of it, but it's not going so well.
What I need is some published articles describing the computer in depth, or
perhaps a failure report. Specifically, there seems to be a severe problem
with their 3.5" drives.
At another lab, consisting of thirty Model 30's w/ two 720K drives per
computer, we have had to swap about 50 drives in the past year. Of course,
they are now about 3 months out of warranty, so it's getting expensive.
Anyway, is this sort of problem consistant along their entire product line, or
just an isolated case?
If anyone has any pointers to some good "IBM-bashing" articles, please let me
know.
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| Greg Philmon ...gatech!dekalb!greg CIS: 72261,1724 |
---------------------------------------------------------joshua@uop.edu (Ed Bates) (05/23/89)
In article <546@dekalb.UUCP>, greg@dekalb.UUCP (Greg Philmon) writes: > A client thinks he wants to equip their new PC Lab with IBM PS/2s. I've been > trying to talk them out of it, but it's not going so well. > > [text deleted] > > Anyway, is this sort of problem consistant along their entire product line, or > just an isolated case? > > If anyone has any pointers to some good "IBM-bashing" articles, please let me > know. Greg, although I do not have a great love of IBM computers, they do have very strong support and marketing, which rates them highly with administrators. We have two labs with IBM PS/2 50s, and have had only 4 service calls since they were installed 18 months ago, and that includes printers. As far as I can tell, your problems appear to be related to the model 30s, or to your machines specifically. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Edwin J. Bates University of the Pacific Academic Computer Specialist Computer Services, 877 W. Stadium Dr. (Jack-Of-All-Computers) Stockton, CA (pretty close to Sacramento) 209-946-2251 95211 (somewhat near San Francisco)
notes@sseacc.SSEACC.EDU ( Notes Admin ) (06/09/89)
Says greg@dekalb.UUCP (Greg Philmon): >A client thinks he wants to equip their new PC Lab with IBM PS/2s. I've been >trying to talk them out of it, but it's not going so well. > >What I need is some published articles describing the computer in depth, or >perhaps a failure report. Specifically, there seems to be a severe problem >with their 3.5" drives. ><stuff deleted> >Anyway, is this sort of problem consistant along their entire product line, or >just an isolated case? We too have been experiencing difficulty with PS/2 Model 30. In one lab, 6 of 24 720k drives have failed, two months out of warranty. In the other, 2 of 12 have failed. The machines were about four months old there so the first drive was sent in for repair under warranty. It's five months later and we finally have it back; it seems either IBM or the authorized repair center require the entire system returned to them or repairs are impossible/slow. While we were waiting for the repair, many drives developed an inter- mitent and seemingly random inability to read/write disks. Rebooting would almost always cure the problem but of course our students lost their work with this "cure". This is an insidious problem. The first trouble reports are impossible to distinguish from the normal background noise of operator error and flaky floppies. Finally the drives just quit reading disks. A few went into hard failure without the intermittent phase. One drive seemed to be able to maintain a dos volume that other drives didn't see (track interleaving?) and the normal dos volume was still readable on a "good" drive. IBM repair center says that the IBM tech. ref. does not cover drive alignment. Our drive test software for xt's (Dysan Disk Interrogator) says the (bad) drives are either aligned or the alignment disk is unreadable; we never see a poorly aligned drive. It acts as if there's range within which a track can be locked on to with no error. The interim solution is to adjust the head position sensor. This is a U shaped IR receiver-transmitter pair located on a postage stamp sized board on the bottom of the drive under the mounting rails. Since we have no documentation for the drive the following is the result of much fiddling and guesswork. It is in no way known to be reliable, safe etc. Beware the metal coated plastic for it is no insulator. Use an absolute sector reader such as Norton Utilities to read the disk during adjustment. Track 20 seems to be a good one to read while track 0 does not. The IBM Starter Diskette can be used as a reference. Also it seems necessary to momentarily assert the "disk is out of the drive" switch by lifting the front of the disk between adjustments. The key is to have the drive reread the position of the sensor between adjustments. The proper (I guess) place for adjustment is halfway between the places where the disk can't be read. Since this may be a range of 1/20 of an inch or less and there are no calibration marks I am not very confident our drives are optimally adjusted. The drives shouldn't be upside down during the times when data is actually being read. We have been running with this solution for about 4 weeks of heavy use (end of quarter) with almost no reports of trouble. One drive has refailed twice but it may (or may not) have a different problem. The real questions are how long will these repairs last and what is the cause of the problem. One clue may be in the drive we had repaired. The head position sensor had been replaced with one that didn't quite fit (transmitter and receiver are split apart). This suggests to me a batch of bad sensors. This is our (unsatisfactory) solution. Surely someone knows a better way. If you can help please let us know. Thank you in advance. One additional problem we've had is with color monitors (8512) gradually getting brighter until unreadable. IBM has replaced these on about 8 of 24 out of warranty machines. About this we have little complaint (except for how long it took). According to IBM this was an early problem which has been solved. James Geisler Loren Pennock South Seattle Community College 6000 16th Ave SW Seattle, Wa 98106 (206) 764-5844