Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!usc!ginosko!aplcen!sdd
From: sdd@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Steve Diamond x6584)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Repair policy for intermittent boot problem
Message-ID: <2745@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>
Date: 20 Aug 89 05:18:29 GMT
Reply-To: sdd@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu
Distribution: usa
Organization: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
Lines: 25

Several previous articles have discussed booting problems in which the hard
disk was intermittently inaccessible.  I experienced this problem once at home
on my two-month old IIcx.  Then I took the machine with me on a two week
vacation during which time booting almost always required 2 to 5 minutes of
doing restarts, powering the machine on/off, etc.  Once the machine booted up
it ran fine.  Now, I've come back home, ready to take the Mac to the shop
before the warranty expires, and (you guessed it) it has booted flawlessly
ever since.

I'm curious as to how repair shops handle cases like this - Murphy says the
Mac will run fine in the shop too.  Will my description of the symptoms be
sufficient to indicate a definite hardware problem, or will I be told to do
a reformat of the disk or equivalent and bring the Mac in when (if) it starts
failing again AFTER the warranty expires?!  If so, is there some way to
"encourage" the Mac to fail to boot more regularly - short of letting it slide 
off the table :-) - so the problem can be isolated?  If I have identified
a problem  during the warranty period, which the repair shop can't
reproduce, am I on my own, or is there some implicit extension of the
warranty - like I assume there would be if a hardware component were fixed
shortly before the warranty expired, and the new component failed, say, two 
months later.

Steve Diamond
JHU/APL
(301)953-6584