ddl@husc6.harvard.edu (Dan Lanciani) (05/21/91)
I have a NEC "Intersect" external CD-ROM drive connected to a 386SX clone by NEC's (Trantor's) host adapter. Lately, I noticed data corruption (try to install new MSLIB and the damaged .EXE crashes; simply copy a set of files from the CD-ROM to hard disk and the copies differ from the originals). The drive is about 6 months old and the problem is (I think!) new. After examining the files more closely, I find that the corruption always consists of a 2k block (on a 2k boundary) whose contents are those of the previous block rather than what they should be. In other words, a block is replicated and a block is lost for no net change in file size. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I dread the task of convincing NEC tech support that something is wrong. Are there any diagnostic programs around? The only explanation I could come up with is that a read error occurs and the error-recovery logic in the Microsoft CD file system re-reads the wrong block. In any case, this kind of undetected error seems a little scary... Dan Lanciani ddl@harvard.*