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From: santerel@grad1.cis.upenn.edu (Walter A. Santarelli)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware,comp.sys.amiga.tech,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: CA-880 external drive problems?
Keywords: CA-880 external floppy problems
Message-ID: <21565@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 9 Mar 90 18:34:51 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: santerel@grad1.cis.upenn.edu ()
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 36

I wonder if there are other net-users out there that have had similar
problems. It seems that my CA-880 is exhibiting some strange
behaviour. I hesitate to say that it's broken because in most respects
it performs fine. Most of the time when I access df1: to save or read
files, the data is saved or retrieved flawlessly. Occasionally,
however, the drive spins briefly and the LED lights for a very short
time. When I ask for a directory of the disk, it shows the files
successfully copied. When I eject the disk and replace it, the files
are gone. This only seems to occur with small files (i.e. under 2K).
It also occurs with certain disk operations such as "snapshot"ing the
disk icon location, renaming the disk, and creating empy directories.
I'm fairly certain that this isn't a viral problem since all of these
operations work on df0: with the same floppy disks.

Has anyone experienced  similar problems with external drives?
(Incidentally, I'm using an A500.) I'm inclined to believe its a
hardware problem. Which is too bad since this is the kind of error
that typically never repeats itself in front of service personell. I
do wonder, however, if it's not something else. Does the AMIGA use any
memory caching? I know the 68000 uses memory mapped IO and if this is
cached it could potentially cause just this sort of problem with
hardware IO devices. I sincerely hope  that this is not the case.
Still this wouldn't explain why it only happens on the external drive;
unless the external drive port is somehow treated differently than the
internal drive. If anyone has any insights into this phenomenon, I'd
appreciate hearing from them. 


Thanks.				Walter
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A Son
	My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew
	What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.
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e-mail: santerel@grad1.cis.upenn.edu