Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!forty2!poole
From: poole@forty2.UUCP (Simon Poole)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: IMPORTANT: ATARI HAS BEEN SELLG BROKEN ST'S!! PLEASE READ!
Message-ID: <181@forty2.UUCP>
Date: 1 Mar 88 18:12:23 GMT
Reply-To: poole@forty2.UUCP (Simon Poole)
Organization: Exp. Physics University Zuerich
Lines: 37

THIS IS NOT A RUMOUR!

It has been brought to my attention that Atari has been manufacturing
ST's with a most serious flaw over the last few months (time span is not
exactlly known). The problem is that some of the drives (Chinon) do not
reckonize a change is the write protect status properly (or at least
do not generate the required signal correctly). This means naturally
that the OS doesn't know when a disk has been changed and will happily
right old disk info to the new disk, which will naturally ruin the contents
of the disk. 

The problem seems to effect the whole ST range (Mega and 1040), not all
are bad, but even Atari doesn't seem to know exactly the extent of
the problem.

To see if your ST has the problem, do the following:

        a) get two NOT write protected disks
        b) insert disk and open window
        c) swap disks and press the Escape key

repeat c) a few times, if your ST always reads from disk each time
you press Escape, you don't have the problem otherwise:

       DON'T USE YOUR ST ANYMORE!

and get the drive swapped!
(If you have a harddisk, you can naturally still use your computer.)

Isn't it nice how Atari alerted us about this problem as soon as they
noticed it :-/.

                              Simon Poole
                              BITNET: K538915@CZHRZU1A
                              UUCP: ...mcvax!cernvax!forty2!poole

PS: Atari Switzerland was trying to cover this up: Bad luck boys!