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From: ramsiri@blake.acs.washington.edu (Enartloc Nhoj)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Hard Drive woes
Keywords: Power supply ?
Message-ID: <5189@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 1 Jan 90 00:38:45 GMT
Organization: Univ of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 51

Wondering if someone could help me diagnose
my hard drive problem...

Symptoms:  Occasionally... and sometimes frequently,
           my Quantum drive slows down and then comes
          back up.  When it slows i obviously can't
            read or write to the drive.  

Conditions:  The drive has been running smoothly
 and without a hitch since last February when i 
bought it new.  I have had it running pretty much
24 hours a day since i purchased it.  I have a good
fan and the housing is always very cool to the touch.

My house definitely needs re-wiring.  Fuse blows are common.
The other day, i came down to the basement and saw that my drive
and system must have lost power at some time during the night.
My monitor displayed just floppies.  Later that morning, when
turning on the oil furnace, another fuse blew...  

I didn't seem to have any problems with the drive the subsequent
day.  A few things seemed strange while i cleaned out and zeroed
out a few partitions to install a 530,000 word dictionary..
unpacked it and ran some checks on the files with wc and grep...
the heads were working hard.. but i couldn't see how that should
harm a the drive in any way.   

I moved the system upstairs to an office on a different electrical
circuit.. then i started noticing the spin problems.. for a 
few days i tried different outlets and surge protectors etc..
sometimes the drive wouldn't even come up to speed.  This morning
i moved the system back to the basement to perhaps isolate the
problem to be the house wiring upstairs..  

I just sat down to my 1040 and saw that a file i had downloaded from 
my host was not written to my drive:  "Check drive.. could be damaged"
warning...  i hit retry and the file saved.  

So the problem is not intermittent...  Therefore, it will be hard to
isolate it and make if fail for a technician.  Anybody out there
ever have similar problems?  

My guess and hope is that it is my power supply...  i couldn't find
any info on "trouble shooting" in the quantum manual... 

Thanks for the help

-kevin
ramsiri@blake.acs.washington.edu

(BTW: Supra host adaptor)