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From: bw@gnu.ai.mit.edu (nobody:*:-2:60001:I. N. Cognito:/:)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Intermittent FAT table problems on new Mitsubishi drive
Message-ID: <15150@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 22 Apr 91 05:38:21 GMT
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I recently installed a Mitsubishi 40 mb 28 ms hard disk in my
AT clone, as a second drive driven by an MFM controller.  The
disk intermittently seems to get "caught", i.e., times out
when trying to read out the FAT #1 table, and causes an error.
CHKDSK will indicate a bad FAT #1 table, bad sector in FAT
table, one moment, but the next time I try CHKDSK a few secs
later, everything will be normal.  When the problem first started,
I ran both Norton and Mace disk utilities to look for bad sectors,
and it never came up with any problems.  I backed up the FAT
table with the Mace backup, and this solved the problem for about
a day (but since the problem is intermittent, perhaps it simply
didn't recur during this time).  The disk was purchased from
Hard Disks International in Phoenix.  They said perhaps there was
a marginal sector, and that I should run a disk utility to check
the disk, but I have repeatedly and no problems are revealed except
a bad sector in FAT table occasionally.  Running a speed-disk
compression program or a FAT backup really doesn't solve the problem.
Do I have a bad disk, a bad controller (never has there been a
problem on my cheap Miniscribe disk over the past 5 years, run
on the same computer), or incompatibility in the controller/disk
settings?  
 
Bruce Waldman
bw@harvarda.harvard.edu
bw@gnu.ai.mit.edu
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