Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!acdpyr!fredrick
From: fredrick@acdpyr.ucar.edu (Tim Fredrick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 1.2 meg floppy failure
Message-ID: <1049@hao.ucar.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 87 19:51:29 GMT
References: <2525@killer.UUCP>
Sender: news@hao.ucar.edu
Reply-To: fredrick@acdpyr.UCAR.EDU (Tim Fredrick)
Organization: Atmospheric Chemistry Division/NCAR, Boulder, CO
Lines: 24
Keywords: high-density floppy drive failure
Summary: AT drive fails at high MHz

In article <2525@killer.UUCP> richardh@killer.UUCP (Richard Hargrove) writes:
>I have been having a very annoying problem with the 1.2 meg floppy drive
>on my AT clone system. For no apparent reason it dies with a critical 
>error 
>
>General Failure error reading drive A
>Abort, Retry, Fail?
>
>after which I must cycle power on the machine to regain access to the drive

A year ago, I bought a Rokoa 6/10 MHz AT  and experienced what might be
the same problem (diskette drive fails randomly and you have to power
down the computer).  It seemed to occur more often with 1.2 Mb
diskettes than with 360 Kb diskettes.   After exchanging hardware boards,
operating systems, disk drives, etc, we eventually came to the conclusion
that the Western Digital disk controller was speed-dependent.  That is,
it failed sometimes when the speed of the computer was 10 MHz.

So, now I switch the AT to 6 MHz whenever I need to do work with floppies.

If anyone else has experienced this problem, has found a different cause,
or has a fix for this situation, it would be good to hear from you.

-Tim Fredrick-----------------------------------------------------