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From: smsmith@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Stephen M. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: 2 PC Questions
Message-ID: <1991Feb8.043253.22719@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 8 Feb 91 04:32:53 GMT
References: <1991Feb7.224045.10886@pa.dec.com>
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yip@wsl.dec.com (Michael Yip (Lt Cmdr - Chief Test Pilot)) writes:
>A friend of mine called me up a couple of days ago with some
>problems on her XT compatible...  
>She was running some kind of database and the machine hung.
>The intersting thing was that she couldn't reboot again from
>her hard drive immediately, but if she left it overnight or 
>for a period of time, she had no problem with it, and could 
>reboot again from the hard drive.  This happened, according
>to her, a few times already.  She had no problem if she was
>to reboot it from drive A and the hard disk was then accessible.
>
>I have not had time to go visit her and looked at the machine
>yet but does this all make sense that if you leave the machine
>off for a while, it would reboot?  Does it sound like the fan is
>not working properly cooling off the boards inside the box?
>======================================================================
>Michael E. Yip
>Digital Equipment Corporation	Internet: yip@wsl.enet.dec.com
>Western Software Laboratory	UUCP: ...decwrl!wsl.enet.dec.com!yip
>======================================================================

I doubt very much that the boards are overheating, although it wouldn't
hurt to reseat them in case the heat expands a slot and causes a
bad connection between a card and the motherboard.  My suspicion is
that it has been a LONG time since she did any disk optimizing, and
over time the heads in the disk have drifted so that when the disk
has run for a while the slight expansion in the disk causes the heads
to misalign with the sectors.

Have her back up the files onto floppies with copy or xcopy, then 
low level format the disk and reinstall the operating system, then
put the files back on.  By using the "copy" or "xcopy" command, the
files will then be written back on the disk in contiguous sectors
and therefore her hard drive will be automatically optimized.

S. "Stevie" Smith \  +  /
<smsmith@hpuxa.   \+++++/    " #*&<-[89s]*(k#$@-_=//a2$]'+=.(2_&*%>,,@
 ircc.ohio-state. \  +  /      {7%*@,..":27g)-=,#*:.#,/6&1*.4-,l@#9:-)  "
 edu>             \  +  / 
 BTW, WYSInaWYG   \  +  /                              --witty.saying.ARC