riehm@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Carl Riehm) (07/30/90)
I am having very annoying problems with my IBM Model 70. Perhaps someone can help me in tracking them down. Some of the most recent ones are the following: 1. I have tried 3 of the standard high quality backup programs and none of them worked perfectly. So I decided to try the DOS backup.com. It seems to have worked, except for one strange thing. Namely as I was backing up my ARBORTXT directory (with the /s parameter in order to include the subdirectories), the name of the file currently being backed up appeared on the screen, of course, but every time I inserted a new disk when prompted to do so, the name ARBORTXT would be misspelled each time until the program came to a new subdirectory. So for example such things as A*BORTXT, A(BORTXT, etc appeared. It was always the first R that was replaced by something else, sometimes another letter, once an up-arrow (ascii 18h), another time a carriage return, and so on. These errors were also recorded in the log file backup.log. I haven't tried to restore them... BTW I did this from within Windows 3.0. On another try from the DOS prompt (on another drive), this did not occur. 2. After backing up, I tried using PCTools compress. It started to compress, then halted and said that there was not enough disk space. When I exited, I was told that I had some lost clusters. I used chkdsk \f , turned them into a file, and deleted them. Then I tried running compress again, with the same result: I lost a few more clusters. Needless to say, I didn't try again. 3. It might be worthwhile to add that a couple of weeks ago, there was an error message saying that the hard disk controller was no good, when I booted up. The diagnostic routine on the reference disk said the same thing, and that the floppy disk and parallel port were also kaput. I took the machine back to the dealer. They checked it out, first thought that the hard disk itself was at fault, then installed the hard disk in another Model 70, found that it worked there, reinstalled it in my Model 70, and it worked there too. So nothing more was done at that point and I started using it again. I used the diagnostic routine again after problems 1, and 2. above, and everything checked out except for an error message "401" regarding the parallel port, saying that I should have the unit serviced; I have been getting this error message for some time now, even before my present spate of problems, and certainly nothing strange has been happening when I print documents (my printer is of course attached to the parallel port). When the dealer checked the machine, this error message re the parallel port did not appear. Help!! Carl Riehm.