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From: vanam@pttesac.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: C-Ltd hard disk (it works! -- sort of)
Message-ID: <411@pttesac.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 17-Apr-87 13:20:53 EST
Article-I.D.: pttesac.411
Posted: Fri Apr 17 13:20:53 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Apr-87 06:05:22 EST
Organization: Pacific*Bell ESAC, San Francisco
Lines: 65
Keywords: C-Ltd hard disk lockup video streaking troubles


I just wanted to report on the status of my C-Ltd 20 Meg
hard disk.

I bought one at the Commodore show in S.F. about a month ago.
That one quickly went bad and I sent it to C-Ltd for repair.
It came back about 2 weeks later with a note that a bad PAL
chip had been fixed in the controller.  Well within a few
days the drive went bad again.  I sent it back again after
calling them.  I convinced them to send me a different unit
so that if the same identical thing happened again, I could
suspect my Amiga or C-Ltd AMega RAM.

I was dissapointed with the speed with which they sent me the
new unit.  I suspect they spent some time trying to repair my
old unit before bothering to send me the new one.  After I spent
$40 of my money to send the thing back to them for the 2nd time,
I expected them to send me a new unit the same day.  After waiting
a week, I called.  I was told that they had trouble finding a new
unit to send to me.  Hmmm.  Anyway a few days later, I did get a
new unit.

This one works!  No fatal errors yet.  No lost data yet.
There was a problem with a superbase demo on this disk.  The demo
worked OK on the first drive I had (while the drive was still working),
but on this new one, I would get a guru everytime I tried to run the
demo.  Finally I tried deleting the entire drawer.  From then on the
hard drive would take about 6 minutes extra to boot.  I could hear
it doing something (trying to fix itself?) and my startup-sequence
would seem to hang.  Eventually everything would come up and I could
read everything on the hard disk OK, but I couldn't write on it.  It
would always say "DH0: not validated".  Doing an "info" command would
show that DH0: was always still being validated.

I finally reformatted the entire drive and partitioned it into 4
sections (I had wanted to partition it eventually anyway).  Formatting
found 0 errors (a pleasant surprise).  I haven't had any "not validated"
or unexplained guru's since.  I only have 2 things (not very fatal)
that still seem to happen.

I have been getting a kind of locked up condition about every
4 hours of use.  Rebooting has so far always brought everything
back.  Another thing that is wrong is that I get this streaking
jibberish on the screen when running "oing" or "instant music".
I suspect the same thing will happen with a lot of games, but
I don't do games much.  I saw the same trouble in a local store
here when they first connected up a hard disk in addition to
expanded memory.

When I say every 4 hours of use, I mean heavy use.  I'm usually
typing a lot and fairly fast.  As a matter of fact, sometimes I
think the lockup condition happens when I'm doing a lot of type-ahead.
Not sure about that yet.

I guess I could try some of Fred Fish'es tricks like adding special
grounding or replacing my 68000 with a ceramic and/or faster version.
Anyone know what that streaking stuff is?

Despite the problems I'm still happy having a hard disk.  I never had
one before.  I love not having to constantly swap floppies.  And the
thing is fast enough that I don't have to put everything in ASDG-RAM:.
I still need to work on backups.  It looks like Fred's backup utility
may be just what I need.  I've just barely started playing with it.

Marnix