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From: spector@suvax1.UUCP (Mitchell Spector)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Disapearing Hard Drives on a Mac II
Message-ID: <791@suvax1.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 22-Nov-87 01:42:14 EST
Article-I.D.: suvax1.791
Posted: Sun Nov 22 01:42:14 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 24-Nov-87 04:32:55 EST
References: <1155@saturn.ucsc.edu> <2115@unc.cs.unc.edu>
Organization: Seattle University, Seattle, WA.
Lines: 35
Keywords: no hard drive all of a sudden
Summary: More hard disk drive disappearing acts

In article <2115@unc.cs.unc.edu>, creech@unc.cs.unc.edu (Jeff Creech) writes:
> In article <1155@saturn.ucsc.edu> fiatlux@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (David Vangerov) writes:
> >... some application... has managed to die and you were forced to reboot.
> >Instead of... a happy mac... you get an icon asking you to insert disk.
> >I don't know how the Mac manages to forget about it's internal hard
> >drive, but it happens (and damn annoying when it does). Anyways,
> 
> I've had the same problem on 4 of our 5 new Mac II's with 80 Meg drives.
> ... 
> Who else is seeing this? Maybe Apple can comment if they've seen this
> problem. I'm carring a utilities disk around in my pocket at all times.
> 
> Jeff Creech
> Macintosh Systems Specialist
> Computer Services
> UNC-CH Dept. of Computer Science

We've seen the same problem on two of our Mac II's.  Both have 2M of RAM,
a 40M internal hard disk drive, and a monochrome monitor.  In both cases,
re-installing the driver solved the problem (without any loss of data).
One incident occurred after running uw, the Unix-window terminal emulator;
I believe the other happened when running one of the public-domain font
editors, but I'm not sure.

I will not run any program which causes random crashes of this nature
again, at least until the cause is explained and I am convinced that
no harm to user data on the hard disk can result.  Perhaps the worst
aspect of this is that it is easy to imagine somebody re-initializing
the hard disk unnecessarily (taking the time to restore from backups
and losing everything created or modified since the last backup).
-- 
Mitchell Spector                                        |"Give me a
Dept. of Computer Science & Software Eng., Seattle Univ.|     ticket to
Path:    ...!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!dataio!suvax1!spector |             Mars!!"
  or:   dataio!suvax1!spector@entropy.ms.washington.edu | -- Zippy the Pinhead