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hd_woes.txt
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1992-01-30
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77 lines
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