Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!usc!elroy!gryphon!mhnadel From: mhnadel@gryphon.COM (Miriam Nadel) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Northgate Problems Summary: long, full of complaints Message-ID: <17029@gryphon.COM> Date: 23 Jun 89 00:18:00 GMT Reply-To: mhnadel@gryphon.COM (Miriam Nadel) Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, CA Lines: 214 Has anyone else experienced incredible hassles with attempting to get service from Northgate Computers? Or can people who have dealt with them or other mail order houses give me an idea of whether I am out of line in being fed up with them? I purchased a 386 from Northgate in early March (the phone call - and my credit card charge were on February 18th, the build invoice is dated February 28th, the picking ticket claims an order date of February 20th and a shipping date of March 7th and I received the machine on March 12th.) I had problems with the machine from the very first day. When changing the system time from Central time to Pacific, I had to rerun the CMOS setup several times to get rid of "diskette types mismatch errors." The first phone call I made to their tech support was on March 14th and their help consisted only of the suggestion that I try running the CMOS setup again. I was able to get the machine to run with only minor anomalies for the next few weeks (note, however, that I was out of town and not using the system for about 8 days during that period!) Those anomalies I attributed to my unfamiliarity with DOS 4.01. On April 2nd I changed the time because of a change to daylight savings time. Immediately afterwards, I attempted to run a program I had been using successfully for several months (on other machines) and recieved a "not enough memory" message. I performed a warm boot and received a "diskette types mismatch or drive error: run setup" message. I ran the CMOS setup routine and was able to reboot the system. Later that afternoon I created a subdirectory using "mkdir." The system appeared to hang so I rebooted it after about 5 minutes. When I looked at the root directory I saw that the subdirectory had been created. I attempted to remove it and received a "directory not empty" message. When I used "dir" to look at the subdirectory, I saw a listing of all the files and directories I had on the entire disk. I attempted to delete these from the subdirectory and discovered that they had not actually been copied but that the FAT had apparently gotten scrambled so that I ended up deleting the system from the disk. I called the Northgate tech support people and they suggested using the DOS 4.01 install program to reformat the hard disk and reinstall DOS. The system appeared to work fine for the next two days, at which time I left on a business trip and a weekend vacation. I returned home on April 10th and turned on the system. It appeared to work find but I noticed that when I had changed to daylight savings time I had forgotten to type a "p" so I was off by 12 hours. Therefore, I reset the time again. I then played a game which requires one to reboot to exit. When I did a warm boot, I got an error message from PCTools that Mirror was unable to make a copy of my FAT. (I have PCTools Deluxe 5.0 and have Mirror in my autoexec.bat). I looked at the disk directory and saw that the FAT was again scrambled and that all of the files and directories on the disk were referenced in the listing of the directory of the last subdirectory I had created. I again called the tech support people who suggested reinstalling DOS. I attempted to do so but received several error messages from the install routine, ranging from the system hanging while attempting to format the hard disk (I would see an "attempting to recover bad allocation unit" message but nothing would happen for an hour at which point I performed a cold boot) to "hard disk controller error 0" while rebooting to "disk not partitioned." In the latter case I exited "install" and used fdisk to examine the partitions and saw that I did indeed have a primary DOS partition occupying the entire disk. I attempted "install" again and when I received the same error message, let the "select" program choose the partitions. This was supposed to cause the system to reboot; however, nothing happened. Up to this point I had not had trouble attempting to boot up from a diskette. The next time I attempting to boot from the system disk, I received a few "drive A not ready" messages before I was able to boot up. On other attempts to boot up the system, either nothing happened or I received "hard disk controller error 0" messages and/or "diskette types mismatch or drive error" messages; the latter went away when I ran the CMOS setup, sometimes repeatedly. I had several conversations with Northgate technical support people during that period but their advice was only to keep running the CMOS setup. The next problem which developed was a "video error" message (one long beep, followed by two short beeps) or nothing at all happening when I attempted to reboot. Another two calls to technical support in the course of which I reseated the video card without effect and examine the leads on the video card to make sure they were not shorted. I was still unable to get the BIOS to recognize the video card. At this point the technical support person offered me the option of either having them send me a new video card, hard disk and hard disk controller or shipping the system back to them for repair; I opted for the latter given the large number of problems I'd been encountering. The machine was sent back to Northgate on April 14th. I received it back on May 18th and the invoice stated that the motherboard had been replaced to fix the video problem and that the disk controller had been replaced to fix the hard disk errors. I left the machine on running a graphics routine for the next two days in a vain attempt to burn in the boards. (I say now that it is a vain attempt because the program did not access the hard disk after intialization so really did nothing to check out the controller. Read on to see the relevance of this remark.) The next problems appeared on June 11th. (Note that I was out of town from June 1 - 8th so that the problem may have occurred as early as May 31th. I did not turn on the machine between then and June 10th.) I turned on the machine to play games for a brief time on the 10th; when parking the machine prior to turning it off, I noticed a strange sound. The next day the system booted fine initially but a warm boot (due to a program hanging) resulted in a "drive C: disk error" message. I finally managed to reach Northgate technical support on the phone on June 14th but they were unable to assist me because I was at my office, rather than at home with the system. I called them early on the morning of the 15th and they advised reseating the controller and all the ribbon cables and, if that failed, reformatting the hard disk. Neither of these had any effect. I attempted reformatting the hard disk using PCFORMAT (from PCTools Deluxe) and received a "bad system area" message. I called back and attempted a low level format but received "bad sector" messages for every sector. The technician then decided that my hard disk was beyond help and authorized replacement of the disk and controller. I received the new hard disk and controller on June 15th. On the 16th I installed them. When I removed the old hard disk, I noticed what appeared to be corrosion on the back, near the pins for the ribbon connectors but I do not know if this is of any relevance to the problems. The physical installation was without incident; however, when I reached the "low level format" step the command "g=c800:5" in debug did nothing. I called tech support again (6/19) and they told me to use "g=cc00:5" for a color system. ( Why this isn't in the installation documentation is beyond me but it turns out that the disk was already supposed to be low level formatted and several other areas of the documentation are out of date so it isn't awfully surprising.) At any rate, I then ran fdisk and attempted to format the disk but DOS format failed. When I ran PCFORMAT, I received a "bad partition table" message. I called tech support again (6/20) and told them this and the technician's response was "why did you low level format?" I told him that I was following the directions in the installation manual and that if I wasn't supposed to low level format, the other technician I spoke to should have told me not to. He then directed me to delete the partition and repartition the disk which I did. It then formatted but "dir" indicated that the disk was only 10 Mb (instead of 65). The technician advised me to repeat the low level format. I did this that evening and was able to partition and format the disk. However, while "format c: /s /v" wrote the system onto the disk, the system still could not be booted from the hard drive. (I received "missing operating system" messages.) The next morning I attempted to redo the DOS level format and first looked to see what, if anything, had been written to the disk in the previous attempt. When I typed "dir c:" I received an "invalid drive" specification message. Rebooting, I was able to access the drive but when I attempted redoing the DOS level format, it was unsuccessful. I ran fdisk and looked at the partition table and it showed that I had an active primary partition of 17 Mb but claimed the overall disk size was 10 Mb. That afternoon I copied fdisk and format off a machine at work so that I could test whether the problem was with them or the hardware. They were able to partition and format the disk but "dir" indicated that the disk was 34 Mb and I still received a "missing operating system" message when attempting to boot from the hard drive. I decided to go ahead and see if I could actually run anything from the hard drive so I copied a small graphics program on and it appeared to run fine. The next morning (this morning! 6/22) I booted up the sytem preparatory to calling tech support again. I did a "dir" of the hard disk and found that the program I had put on the previous day had vanished. When I talked to tech support, the only possibility they could offer was that the drive had been damaged in shipping (not preposterous since they ship them in unsealed wrappings in styrofoam which has considerable potential for causing damage from static electricity!) When they offered to ship another replacement hard disk and controller, I told them that I wanted to discuss any options I might have for returning the whole system since it had only worked between 25 and 43 days out of the roughly 100 that I had it. (It depends on what you want to assume about whether the machine was working when I was away; even if it were 43% reliability is pretty poor in my eyes!) They gave me the number of the customer satisfaction department. When I called them I discussed the situation and they called technical support, they decided that I had not had sufficient problems with the system to warrant refunding my money. If I insisted on returning it, there would be a 15% restocking fee because this was "such a long time" after I received the system. (Note that the system has a 1 year warranty. I was never informed of any restriction on how long I had to give up hope of their tech support people finding and fixing the problems. The only relevant phrase on the warranty as far as I can tell is "returns due to customer error are subject to a 15% restocking fee;" it is unclear to me how they could claim that this applies to my situation. Another paragraph of the warranty states that "any damage, items missing, or any other discrepancy with your requested order must be reported to Northgate within 7 days of receipt or the buyer waives any and all indemnities for such discrepencies." However, this appears to me to refer to things like them sending you a monochrome system when you paid for VGA and the like. They said I should make another attempt with a replacement hard drive and controller; I asked whether they would then refund my money should such a replacement be unsuccessful to which the customer satisfaction representative replied that she couldn't make guarantees. I agreed to this attempt, mostly because I see no other choice. I remain unimpressed with the competence of the technical support people (on one of my many phone calls - each one of which seemed to result to talking to a different technician, by the way - I was told that hardware problems are rare and that almost all of their calls are people who don't understand DOS. If this is indeed so, it could account for their failure to diagnose hardware problems. However, since they are in the business of selling software, I do not consider this an adequate excuse.) At this point I am almost hoping that the new hard disk and controller do not work because I am so disgusted with the repeated problems that I've had. (Even during the period when the machine has worked, there have always been some anomalies - largely video related, but I have not had the time to attempt dealing with these.) I have advised two colleagues who were considering purchasing essentially the same system to use local dealers instead since any savings I might have had by buying from Northgate have been eaten up by long distance telephone calls (only sales has an 800 number; several times I have asked tech support to call me back when they could not help on the first attempt but they have yet to do so. Indeed, the customer satisfaction department was supposed to have them call me today with a new return merchandise authorization number but I have been in my office all afternoon with nary a peep. Disgustedly, Miriam Nadel -- Not one of the 18% of Americans who are underweight. mhnadel@gryphon.COM !gryphon!mhnadel nadel@aspen.aero.org