Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!ogccse!emory!auc!rar
From: rar@auc.UUCP (Rodney Ricks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: !HELP! BAD DISKS ? (Drives on IBMs go bad, too.)
Summary: IBMs immune to disk failure???   SUURRRRE!!!!
Message-ID: <32315@auc.UUCP>
Date: 8 Nov 89 16:43:27 GMT
References: <89110701494798@masnet.uucp>
Reply-To: rar@auc.UUCP (Rodney Ricks)
Organization: Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, Ga.
Lines: 67

In article <89110701494798@masnet.uucp> mark.ji@canremote.uucp (MARK JI) writes:
>Something is distinctly wrong with my A500.. Whenever i try to format a
>new disk, the format procedure always starts up, when after formatting
>the first track and trying to validate it, the computer tells me that
>the disk is unreadable...
>Can anyone tell me how to go about formatting my disks ?
 
Have you been playing any heavily protected games lately?  I have a friend
whose disk drive acted flaky after sessions of playing Menace.  I forget
what he did to fix the problem.  I'll ask him when I see him.

Then again, I doubt if that's your problem, but I'll just throw that out
there anyway, just in case.

>I'm beginning to wish i stayed on the IBM, being immune to these
>problems.
 
Ha ha ha ha ha!  Oh, that's a good one... 'IBMs are immune to those types of
problems...'

Wait, I didn't see any smileys!!!  Were you serious?

IBM PCs and Clones do have those type of disk problems, believe me.
Right now, I'm sitting in a lab full of AT&T PC6310's.  They have been here
somewhere between one and two years.  Out of the 15 in here, four of the
hard disks have spontaneously died.  Recently, one of the floppy drives
died, too.  It scared one of the students to death.  She thought that something
was wrong with her disk, and that she had lost a lot of work that she had
done on a paper.  It turns out that the drive just couldn't read the disk.
She went to another computerand its drive had no trouble reading the disk.

I worked for a computer dealer once who told me about one time when he was
repairing an IBM PC.  It had a dead floppy drive.  When he took out the drive,
he noticed that it was made of such cheap plastic that he could actually BEND
it in his hand! (The drive was made in Malaysia...)  This wasn't some kind of
clone, this was a real live, "true blue" IBM PC!

Also, if you want to look more into drive reliability (particularly hard-drive
reliability), you can ask about the earlier PC ATs, whose hard drives very
often died a very early death.

This is not to say that you should not complain about such problems,
specifically the reliability problems with the Amiga 500.  Just remember that
the IBM clones have such problems, too.  Also remember (in this case) that the
floppy drive isn't made by Commodore, it's bought from someone else.  Whose
to sat that if you bought a PS/2 you wouldn't get the same drive (or the same
quality drive)?

So, it's ok to complain.  Remember, complaining is what Amiga owners do best!!!


Oh, and for those whose complain about real-time clock inaccuracies, each of
the battery-backed clocks in these AT&T PCs seem to have a mind of its own.
I don't think any of them keep time very well at all.

I know that all of these things are pains and they should be fixed, but we share
these pains with PC clone owners.

>Mark
>
> * QNet 1.03a3: Amiga Blue International (416)844-0465 Toronto (SmartNet)

-- 
"We may have come over here in different ships,
 but we're all in the same boat now."   --   Jesse Jackson

Rodney Ricks,   Morehouse College