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From: vanam@pttesac.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: CLtd 20M hard disk
Message-ID: <383@pttesac.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 27-Feb-87 19:32:35 EST
Article-I.D.: pttesac.383
Posted: Fri Feb 27 19:32:35 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Mar-87 13:29:57 EST
Organization: Pacific*Bell ESAC, San Francisco
Lines: 78
Keywords: Cltd 20M hard disk troubles


Last Saturday I went to the Commodore computer show in San Francisco.
While there I saw Cltd's hard disks and was inspired to buy one.  I
was also eyeing Byte by Byte's PAL junior expansion/hard disk, but
because of back orders, it wouldn't be available to me 'till April.
A person in the Byte by Byte booth warned me that Cltd had done their
expansion wrong; that they were not using the full Zorro specification
and that as a result they required a hardware change in the Amiga.
This bothered me since I was hoping to get a hard disk that day.  When
I asked one of the Cltd people about this, he said that they hadn't
made any modifications to the Amiga's on display, and that as I could
see they were working perfectly.

When I said I wanted to buy one, and got my credit card out, the
Cltd salesman asked me when I had bought my Amiga.  I told him
May '86.  He said I might need to make a PAL upgrade because some
of the older Amigas had a problem with a couple of PAL chips on
the daughter board.  Hmmm, I thought.  Well I still wanted the
hard disk.  It's been quite a while since I've had to do any
work on hardware, but I figured I could do it.  The salesman gave
me 2 new chips.  He said they were faster than the older versions
in the older Amigas.  He also gave me a $20 little extension card to
be used to connect the SCSI board to my external (Cltd) RAM board.

I trusted them and bought myself a 20M unit for $849.  When I got the
unit home, I noticed that the SCSI interface board didn't look like
the SCSI interface boards on the display Amigas in the show.  Instead
it looked just like my Cltd 1Meg external RAM board.  Not that I
minded the new look (it looked nicer), but I didn't like the idea of
getting something that looked different from what was on display at
the show when I wasn't told about it.

I did the PAL upgrade on my Amiga's daughter board.  It took me
quite a while because I had a hell of a time getting the solder
sucked out of three holes.  I ended up having to take the old IC's
out by cutting the pins where the solder wouldn't suck out, then
heating and sucking and punching with a fine ice pick till I got
those holes cleaned out.  Very tedious.  However the computer worked
fine afterwards.  I did a complete memory test of my external
Cltd AMega board without a single failure.  I also spent a few hours
running all my important programs to make sure there weren't any
glitches.  Everything worked just like before.

When I connected my new Cltd 20Meg hard disk and booted using Cltd's
kickbench disk, things seemed to work OK until I used up some of my
fast memory.  Things were unpredictable.  I would get random visits
from the guru.  I finally isolated the trouble to the combination of
the hard disk and fast ram expansion not working together.  Somewhere
along the line I found some documentation on the hard disk in a
directory which had no drawer icon.  The documentation said that
there may be a problem with the binddrivers command and that I should
be sure and put the binddrivers command after the loadwb command in
my startup file.  Doing so helped a lot, but still I had some unexpected
guru visits.  Then I found some more documentation on the hard disk
which said that I should use the mount command instead of the
binddrivers command.  Did that.  Everything worked OK for a few hours,
then right after running one of those game programs that takes over
the machine, the hard disk was suddenly "NOT A DOS" !  No matter what
I tried, rebooting, power off and on, etc, the hard disk was "NOT A DOS".
In desperation I tried to format the disk.  The format program said it
was doing it, but would immediately abort without an explanation.  I even
tried partitioning the drive and formatting the separate (4) sections.
Same trouble with format.  Finally I tried removing my 1 Meg fast ram
and lo and behold, the hard disk worked and everything was still there!
(Whew).  So now I'm running without my fast ram.

I called Cltd customer service.  Since I had already done the PAL
upgrade, all they could tell me to do was to pack up the hard disk
and send it to them.  They would check it out and repair it if
needed.  Well, first I'm going to try my RAM again.  It seemed like
everything worked fine for about 3 hours, so maybe it's a loading
or heat problem.  I'd like to know more about it before I go sending
things out.

If anyone has had similar experiences or has suggestions, please
let me know about them.  Anything I learn I will share.

Marnix