shiva@well.sf.ca.us (Kenneth Porter) (06/14/91)
Can anyone tell me why my system can't write a floppy reliably from the OS/2 prompt, but can from the DOS prompt? It's a Dell System 310 (386/25) running IBM OS/2 1.3 SE. Sometimes the file copy works, sometimes not :-(. Ken (shiva@well.sf.ca.us)
shiva@well.sf.ca.us (Kenneth Porter) (06/22/91)
It appears my query about floppy troubles was premature. A coworker reported that only the Dell 310's exhibit this problem, and upon checking, I found that they were the only machines with a "B-step" 386 processor, which is an early flawed chip revision that Autodesk warns about. One of the guys in drafting who uses AutoCAD 11 under DOS was having all kinds of trouble on his PS/2 Model 80; it was hanging up several times an hour. We swapped in another (we thought) identical PS/2 and the hangs went away. There's a program included with AutoCAD that checks for the flakey 386 so on a hunch we went around and tried it on several machines and found that his old PS/2 and the Dell's that we were having floppy problems with all had the B-step chip. We're now trying to get new CPU's to see if it fixes the problem. Upon further testing, I think that the problem I reported a few months ago regarding failures of DosReallocSeg may also be due to the B-step CPU. I'll report back on this once I replace the CPU. Ken (shiva@well.sf.ca.us)