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From: grh@cbnewsl.ATT.COM (george.r.heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: A500 Floppy Drive Weirdness
Keywords: hardware broken any guesses
Message-ID: <3512@cbnewsl.ATT.COM>
Date: 5 Jan 90 19:00:22 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 33


Here's a challenge for you hardware guru's out there...

I recently convinced a fellow-employee that the computer he wanted for
his 5-year old to do music and paint software was an Amiga 500.  So he
enthusiastically ran out the day before Christmas and bought an A500
at one of the local computer stores.  The first disappointment occurred
when he plugged it in Christmas day and the power supply was dead.  But
a trip to the dealer the next day yielded a new one and he set out to
copy his workbench disks.  Since he had a single drive, he used the
duplicate option from the workbench and 50% of the time or more he got
a read/write error whenever he tried to write on the destination disk.
A trip back to the dealer was fruitless in that they were able to dup
a disk and they sent him away.  Anyway, back home again, the same thing
started to happen.  It seems that he can read disks OK but in the course
of duplicating disks or trying to read disks that he succesfully wrote,
he continues to get read/write errors.  I thought his internal drive might
be bad, so I loaned him my 1010 to see what happened, and he had exactly
the same problems with my good 1010.

Anyway, I have reasonable faith in this guy to believe that he's doing all
the right things, but is having some sort of hardware problem.  Now that
we've eliminated the internal drive itself as a possible source of the
problem, does anyone have an idea of what to suspect next?  He talked to
the dealer about checking this out, but they told him that he could take it
to a local warranty place and wait a couple of weeks or that if they looked
at it they'd charge him $60/hr if they didn't find anything wrong (This
doesn't seem right to me, but that's an issue for another post).  So he's
pretty much dead in the water for at least 2 weeks.  Anybody got any good
ideas of what's going on?

Randy Heuer
att!cbnewsl!grh