bhughes@lotus.com (Brian Hughes) (11/09/90)
Hi,
I've got a problem with my home SE and its internal HD. First the history:
A few months ago, my stock hard drive (20Meg Miniscribe) started taking
longer and longer to boot up from power on. The icon of a floppy with
a flashing question mark would come up for some time before the drive
booted. Finally, the drive would boot - time from power on to boot finally
stabilized at ~15 minutes. Found my +5V was ~4.84V, so cranked it up to
4.95V, and time to boot dropped to ~8 min. I left it like this. After booting,
the drive works with no problems.
A few weeks ago time to boot started increasing back up to 15 minutes.
During this time the drive light will go on for a while, and then go off,
and then repeat the cycle. I assume that the ROM routine gives up on that
unit, and tries all the other SCSI units (of which I have none) before
retrying the disk again. (See Bo3b's Tech Note on the internals of booting).
Now I've gotten a (used) Conner 105Meg drive. I drop it in, after
putting the termination packs in place, and power up. The disk light flashes
at power up (a SCSI reset ? master power reset ?) just like the Miniscribe,
but then nothing happens (no more activity light, no audible noises). Adjusted
the 5V power supply to 5.1V; no change. Put the Miniscribe back in, and after
it's 15 minutes of thinking about life, it boots.
The Conner was said to work when it was sold to me (right, Phil ?), and
it was properly packed with no signs of shipping damage. SCSIEvaluator
cannot see any SCSI units when the Conner is in place. I've tried SCSI addresses
0 and 1 - no change.
Any thoughts ? Is the SCSI circuit or ROM on my motherboard marginal ? I
suppose that the Miniscribe could be succuming to stiction, even though
these drives have never been noted as being prone to that problem, and that
the Conner has another problem. Still, it seems more likely that there is
a single cause for these failures that is external to the drives themselves.
Please repond to me, and I'll post a summary back when I either achieve a
fix or determine the culprit. Thanks.
--
Disclaimer: All opinions expressed herein are my own, and do not
necessarily reflect those of my employer, the stockholders, my cats,
or anyone else.
--
Disclaimer: All opinions expressed herein are my own, and do not
necessarily reflect those of my employer, the investors, or anyone
else.