HARD DRIVE WOES
                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                              John Neilson 

                                ACE Membership Number 154

Back in October I bought one of those wonderful devices from Par-
agon Computers -- a 100 megabite hard disk drive !!  I  thought 
all  my Christmases had come at once !  I spent  countless  hours 
loading up all FIVE partitions,  rearranging all my programs  and 
experimenting   with  loading  and  running  programs   and   the 
associated files, all with consumate ease and oh such speed !!!

The  only cloud on the horizon was an occasional  tendency,  from 
Day 1,  for the screen to go crazy, like a TV which has lost it's 
horizontal  control.  The  only way out of it was to  do  a  warm 
reboot. The suppliers put this down to a monitor problem..."check 
the  earth  connection",   they  said.   All  my  enquiries  from 
knowledgeable club members and anyone else who would listen, were 
to  no  avail.   It  seemed  to  happen  mostly  within  NEODESK, 
especially when saving an NEODESK.INF file, or when copying files 
to  a  partition on the HD.  Then I found that working  from  the 
desktop produced the same result,  but not as often.  You have no 
idea how sick I got of rebooting half a dozen times every evening 

Pressure  of work stopped me from doing anything about  it  until 
the Christmas holidays.  I recently bought a second-hand Phillips 
colour  monitor--and a very similar thing started happening  with 
it.  So......off  to  ATARI with the  monitor........no  problems 
there.  Next day,  back with the whole boot & caboodle.  Hook  in 
another computer---the problem persisted. So having ruled out the 
monitor  and the computer,  that left only my precious Hard  Disk 
Drive.  And that gradually deteriorated as we played around  with 
it,  trying to zero 'C' partition,  copy all 'C' files to another 
partition  and so on.  No luck.  So off I went home with my  tail 
between my legs and dragging my spirits behind me !

When  I  rang  Paragon  for  a  return  authorization  number,  I 
discovered  that the problem was known to them,  and comprised  a 
basic  incompatability between the Reference-100 Hard Disk  Drive 
and  the ST520FM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Now they tell  me,  after  3 
months  of agonizing over the problem!!!!!!!!!!!  Their  solution 
was to hook it into an STE.....but I can't afford one of them, as 
I've just spent all my money on a Hard Disk Drive !!  They reckon 
that  the problem hasn't occurred in the United  Kingdom  because 
they use different ROM chips there.

All that wasted time and effort!  Not to mention the  frustration 
of having to reboot so often. To give them their due, however, 
they made no bones about taking the unit back for as full credit, 
and even arranging the freight at their cost.
 
I  even  had a lovely letter drafted out in  response  to  Jeff's 
queries about how we use our "Most Precious Possession", but that 
went  west  with  all  the other data on  the  Hard  Disk  Drive. 
Fortunately  I  had been in the habit of backing up my  files  to 
floppies at the end of each session, so none of them were lost.


I  guess  the  most  unsatisfactory  aspect  of  the  whole  sad 
experience is that there is nothing I COULD have done to  prevent 
all  this  aggravation.  It was just an  incompatibility  problem 
which hadn't cropped up at the time I bought my unit.

Gary Spiteri was a great help with the diagnosis,  & I would like 
to express my appreciation to him.


                 << John Neilson