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From: ekrimen@ecst.csuchico.edu (Ed Krimen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: TOS version 1.6 question
Message-ID: <1991Mar01.185035.15864@ecst.csuchico.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 91 18:50:35 GMT
References: <1230.27ccffaa@sleepy.bmd.trw.com> <1991Mar01.064259.7340@ecst.csuchico.edu> <1991Mar01.105356.13711@cs.ruu.nl>
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avgroeni@cs.ruu.nl (Annius Groenink) writes:

- In <1991Mar01.064259.7340@ecst.csuchico.edu> ekrimen@ecst.csuchico.edu (Ed Krime
- n) writes:
-
- >The hard drive problem, which has been fixed for about six months, 
- >was NOT related to TOS, but a hardware error.  I have TOS 1.6 in my 
-
-   Why didn't anyone tell that before? I have an STE for about 10 months,
-   (10 > 6)
-   and I planned to buy a hard disk NEXT WEEK. Now you're telling me it
-   won't work! Does someone know the exact `symptoms' (brrr.)? Should I
-  not buy a cheep second-hand SH204, because it wouldn't work or something?

If you can, connect a hard drive, WITHOUT ANY VALUABLE DATA ON IT, to 
your STe for about an hour or two or more if you can, and move files 
around, load files, save files, etcetera.  Do a lot of file stuff.  
What you'll see first is that the directory entries will be skewed 
two characters (or two bytes??); this is what happened on a Megafile 
I saw at a dealer.  On my ICD drive, I got 'Drive *: not responding' 
and some other drive-related errors, but luckily no data was lost.

You may or may not have the hard drive (DMA) bug, but there's no 
other way that I know of to check it.  It may take longer than a 
couple of hours to check.  Mine occurred, if I remember correctly, 
within 4 at the most.

Moreover, from what I hear, it was only a small percentage of STes 
with this problem (Atari says 10% I think).  Even though the STes 
were in Canada and Europe first, the problem didn't seem to crop up 
until they were released in the US.

-- 
         Ed Krimen  ...............................................
   |||   Video Production Major, California State University, Chico
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