C506634@UMCVMB.MISSOURI.EDU (Eric Edwards) (11/16/90)
For those who don't remember my earlier posts: Flakey Floppy and Flakey Floppy, the saga continues. A little recap. Since about mid august I've had serious problems with my floppy drives. They would read fine but would quickly corrupt a disk if you wrote to. Note that ALL the drives do this: internal, old pioneer, and brand new supra. Just before I completely lost my sanity, I found a wonderfull program called TrackSalve. It has an option to verify all writes and retry up to two times. If the third write fails to verify, a requestor pops up to try again. This solved the problem for a while. Times when the drives failed to write in three attempts were very rare. Unfortunately, my drives have gotten steadily worse. I can no longer expect that deleteing all the files on a disk or copying many files will not pop up the requestor at least once, if not several times. I have noticed some patterns. The chance of an error is dependent, not on the total access but their frequency. Downloading the contents of an entire disk will work just fine. Deleting these files with delete * all will results in an error if there eare more than about a dozen of them. Operating on two disks at once is virtually unusuable becuase of the number of errors. The chance of error seems to have some relation to the "distance". df1: is worse than df0: and df2: is the worst of all. Another thing happend recently that may be totally unrelated but I'll mention it anyway. My "n" key stopped working. "n" and "N" output nothing. Alt-N did something though. I rebooted and, as expected, the n key worked. But the "y" key didn't! Has anyone out there heard of anything remotely like this problem? Or better yet, have a suggestion for fixing it? Eric Edwards: c506634 @ "The 3090. Proof that by applying state of the Inet: umcvmb.missouri.edu art technology to an obsolete architecture, Bitnet: umcvmb.bitnet one can achieve mediocre performance."