hudson@EECS.WSU.EDU (Scott Hudson) (05/24/91)
I have consistently had problems with the 1.44MB floppy drive on my RS/6000 model 320, and I'd be interested in hearing (by e-mail) from anyone who has had a similar experience. I've been using Sony MFD-2HD disks. They'll format fine, I'll tar data onto them, be able to read the data back a few times, but about 10-20% of the disks will eventually give me an I/O error. At that point attempting to format the disk gives me a "diskette bad or incompatible" error, and the disk appears to have been trashed because it won't format on other RS/6000s or PCs either. This has happened with disks from 4 different boxes. My IBM rep says that this failure rate is not unusual for high-density diskettes, but that I have a hard time believing that. Thanks for any help, Scott Hudson (hudson@eecs.wsu.edu)
lance@mpd.tandem.com (Lance Hartmann) (05/29/91)
From devnull!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!serval!EECS.WSU.EDU!hudson Tue May 28 16:02:18 CDT 1991 Article: 4928 of comp.unix.aix Path: devnull!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!serval!EECS.WSU.EDU!hudson From: hudson@EECS.WSU.EDU (Scott Hudson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix Subject: floppy problems on RS/6000 320 Message-ID: <1991May24.001446.22544@serval.net.wsu.edu> Date: 24 May 91 00:14:46 GMT Sender: news@serval.net.wsu.edu (USENET News System) Distribution: usa Organization: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University Lines: 9 >From: hudson@EECS.WSU.EDU (Scott Hudson) >Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix >Subject: floppy problems on RS/6000 320 >Message-ID: <1991May24.001446.22544@serval.net.wsu.edu> > > Scott writes: > >I have consistently had problems with the 1.44MB floppy drive on my RS/6000 model 320, and I'd be interested in hearing (by e-mail) from anyone who has had a similar experience..... > >Scott Hudson (hudson@eecs.wsu.edu) > I, too, encountered such problems and it seemed (coincidentally?!?) to occur more with "tar" than "cpio" which I used more frequently. As an experiment, when the disk failed to re-format, I ran a magnet over it for awhile and lo and behold it formatted fine! Now, of course, this isn't the optimal solution and I certainly would NOT recommend it over the long haul as I am unsure of the potential ill effects to the drive. I also look forward to hearing about this from other people.... -- Lance G. Hartmann - cs.utexas.edu!devnull!lance (Internet) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: All opinions/actions expressed herein reflect those of my VERY OWN and shall NOT bear any reflection upon Tandem or anyone else for that matter.