brad@cup.portal.com (Paul B Anders) (08/06/90)
I think I saw some previous discussion on this topic, but ignored it until it started happening to me. System specifics: Orchid Privlege 386/25 w/32K cache, 4MB RAM, AMI BIOS, Connor 84MB drive, DTK paddleboard. Upon invoking W3, and sometimes during loading of W3 applications, my hard dis activity light comes on solid ( no flicker as during program loading ), and stays on for extended periods (20-30sec). Most of the time, the program will then continue to load, but sometimes I get the "Unrecoverable ...." error msg. Usually a second attempt will load the program. The problem is random and does not have a correlation to a specific app or phase of the moon. A friend told me that it is possible that this is due bit errors on data xfer from the drive to the paddleboard thru the long unshielded ribbon cable. Any help would be appreciated. Brad Anders / brad@cup.portal.com
smwong@hantsv.enet.dec.com (Stephen Wong) (08/08/90)
In article <32497@cup.portal.com>, brad@cup.portal.com (Paul B Anders) writes: |> Upon invoking W3, and sometimes during loading of W3 applications, my hard dis |> activity light comes on solid ( no flicker as during program loading ), and |> stays on for extended periods (20-30sec). Most of the time, the program will |> then continue to load, but sometimes I get the "Unrecoverable ...." error msg. |> Usually a second attempt will load the program. The problem is random and |> does not have a correlation to a specific app or phase of the moon. A friend |> told me that it is possible that this is due bit errors on data xfer from the |> drive to the paddleboard thru the long unshielded ribbon cable. Any help would |> be appreciated. Have you used any disk managment software (Disk Manager, etc.)? Win 3.0 conflicts with some of this software when accessing > 1024 cylinder. If the configuration is standard (ie. no special device driver), then maybe your hard disk deserve a low level format to recover the strength of magnetic field on various header bits. stephen@hantsq.enet.dec.com
mikew@proton.LCS.MIT.EDU (Michael B. Williams) (08/08/90)
I am following this up so that people won't get the impression that this problem is something simple like a device driver conflict. I had the same problem with a Conner 100MB drive running Windows 2.11. The only difference in using the Conner and my previous MFM drive was that Windows would take significantly longer to load; once loaded, everything worked fine, however. The important points are 1) Windows undoubtedly took significantly longer to load--on the order of 1 minute on my 386SX versus a normal loading time of 10 or 15 seconds. 2) The phenomenon occured regardless of which device drivers (such as DM) are loaded at the time. 3) The phenomenon always affected Windows loading time, but only sometimes did it affect application loading difficulties. My friend has a Conner IDE drive that doesn't have this problem. I eventually returned the Conner (for other reasons), but I'm still curious to know why this was happening. ______________________________________________________________________ Michael B. Williams | /| /| ) /| / Room 527 | / | / |--<| / | / Laboratory for Computer Science | / |/ |___)/ |/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Internet: mikew@athena.mit.edu 545 Technology Square | CompuServe: 73667,3264 Cambridge, MA 02139 | AT&T: (617) 253-6015