barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) (05/11/91)
This is posted for a friend. His A500's external drive is destroying his floppy data. Reply DIRECTLY BY E-MAIL (he cannot read news) to: Mike Metlay mpmst1@vms.cis.pitt.edu Dan I own a system with an A500 with 1 Meg, the std. old monitor, a serial MIDI interface, a Zoom modem, and an A1010 external drive-- nothing fancy. My problem is as follows. Under normal use and under most circumstances, the system operates fine for disk formatting and copying, all the usual read/write tasks. However, sometimes during a write to the A1010 (I don't THINK this has ever happened during a read operation), the A1010 wil suddenly begin to grind, as if searching for something. It then gives me a requester that reads, "VOlume (whatever) has a read/write error". After that, regardless of whether I click on retry or cancel, it says something like, "Initialize Failed, Disk is unreadable." Then, "Disk Structure is Corrupt; use DISKDOCTOR to recover it." After that happens, the disk will be unreadable by either drive, and must be reformatted. What's going on here? Is the drive fucked up? Have I somehow bought three boxes of flopies in a row with a 20% failure rate (I use only 3M diskettes)? Is there something in software that's eating disks randomly (I kinda doubt this is a virus; I don't download anything but ASCII, and never from BBSes)? It's cost me a bunch of disks and a lot of very expensive connect time (2/3 of the way through a Kermit receive-- GRUNCH GRUNCH, BARF, GURU. AAGH!). I'm horribly paranoid about making backups now; I don't know if they'll take. The problem only happens once in a while; I can come back to the Amiga the next day and it'll be fine. Then, days or weeks later-- BANG! Got me again! I'm running WB1.3 with DMouse, usually. If anyone has any ideas, I'd like to hear them. Please Email me as I can no longer receive news; a friend is posting this for me. My address is mpmst1@vms.cis.pitt.edu Thank you in advance, mike metlay