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From: goldstein@delni.dec.com (Explicitly political)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Weird floppy disk behavior
Message-ID: <11852@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 18:21:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.11852
Posted: Wed Oct 14 18:21:00 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Oct-87 05:34:35 EDT
Sender: daemon@decwrl.DEC.COM
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 30


    My ST has been doing some very strange things lately.  It used to
    be that when I swapped disks (internal 1040STf drive) and hit "ESC",
    the GEM file window would show the new disk's files.  Lately,
    though, it's been flakey.  It might show _some_ of the new disk's
    files (i.e., 25 out of 70), or it might show some of the new disk's
    files alphabetically sorted with some of the old disk's files, or
    it might work normally.
    
    At first I suspected fried media, but I eliminated that by trial
    and error.  It popped up when I first tried formatting a disk with
    DCFMTCLR (DC Formatter) with an IBM boot block (so I could move
    text to the NEC Multispeed), but it later happened with Fixed Twister
    disks.  The workarounds involve sticking in a third disk (with ROM
    formatting?) or using the close box and reopening via the icon.
    
    A particularly weird one happened when I was copying bunches of
    files at a time (via the RAMdisk) from an NEC-formatted MS-DOS disk
    to a DCformatted disk.  The new disk didn't show the files at all
    after I completed the copy job, so I started again.  The next day
    I turned the Atari back on, looked at the disk, and found DUPLICATES
    of the files which I had copied twice -- the missing stuff reappeared
    and the recopy of 15 files (of the 70) was still there too!  BTW
    the "free space" was rather random too, and a number of times the
    MS-DOS disk showed fried-disk symptoms like garbage files popping
    up on top of the disk.  Also the MS-DOS label came out as a zero-length
    file on the Atari.
    
    What gives?
          fred