Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!VTVM1.BITNET!PHILIP
From: PHILIP@VTVM1.BITNET (Fred Senese)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: ST157N problems
Message-ID: <8901022054.AA08155@jade.berkeley.edu>
Date: 2 Jan 89 20:16:44 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 25

After a few months of fairly trouble-free operation I am having
trouble with my hard drive.
   1) The drive won't spin up consistently.  When it is stuck I can get it to
spin up by tweaking the spindle on the bottom of the drive with a screwdriver.
   2) The drive will run for several hours or days but eventually gives
lots of read-write errors (and executables on the drive aren't recognized
as object modules.)  A file that is corrupt one day is OK the next.  The
Find Bad Blocks command in MDFixer reports different positions and numbers of
bad blocks every time it is run.  I can on occasion find only 4 bad blocks
on the last few cylinders of the disk (exactly what I found before the drive
got sick) but at other times I get around 200 bad blocks.  The drive fails
at different times in the startup-sequence.

  My configuration: A1000 w/2M Starboard II, Stardrive, attached to an ST157N
in a Wetex case & power supply with a heavily shielded cable.  I haven't done
the PAL fix. I am running KS/WB 1.3.

  I've tried reseating the Starboard II and the cables.  It doesn't help (altho
ugh moving the 50->25 pin cable from the drive to the DB25 connector in the
Wetex case seems to help temporarily (the drive will run for hours before I get
another read-write error).  So possibly 2) is a faulty connection inside
the cable? Does anyone know where I can get a replacement for this cable?
Should I have the drive replaced? (It's still under warranty-I think).

Any advice you can offer will be greatly appreciated.