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From: burton@parcvax.Xerox.COM (Philip M. Burton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: AT disk or controller problems?
Message-ID: <444@parcvax.Xerox.COM>
Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 15:48:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: parcvax.444
Posted: Sun Aug 23 15:48:42 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Aug-87 05:47:06 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: Xerox PARC
Lines: 36
Keywords: General Failure reading drive C: but it's OK later

Recently I did a low-level reformat of my hard disk so I could clean up 
everything at once.  (This may or may not be coincidental.)  My system is
a 6 MHz IBM PC AT with a Maxtor 1140, running 4 partitions.  This has worked
fine for many months.  

I recently ran into some random problems installing software, so I did the
low level format, which indicated only the known bad spots, etc.

However, at various times, mostly while copying a whole floppy of software,
I get the dreaded error message above.  Each time I have done the following
with complete success:

1)  Power cycle the machine.

2)  Reboot.  The autoexec.bat file is executed with lots of retries by the
disk controller, indicating it has trouble reading the disk.

3)  Run norton utilities DT to check all sectors and all files on my C partition.

4) Everything is OK.

5) Pick up where I left off, and reload the files from the floppy, when the
whole thing started.

Does anybody on the net have any ideas?

Please post rather than send mail, because my system's mailer is flaky and I
may not be able to reply via mail.

Thanks in advance


-- 
Philip Burton
Xerox Corporation    408 737 4635
 ... usual disclaimers apply ...