Date : Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:02:27 -0000
From : bbcmailinglist@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Technomatic Disaster
I'm pretty sure from the testing I did when the drive first went in December
2007 that it's not the disc or the Adaptec board at fault. I remember testing
both of these in other setups and they worked fine, so I got as far as assuming
it was the host adapter board, although I don't remember whether I tested
the host adapter with other discs or controllers at the time.
However, now that I am getting the Technomatic unit variously working and
not working for apparently short periods, I'm wondering if it could be either
the drive or the Adaptec board giving intermittent faults (or both, or the
host adapter as well!)
Best wishes,
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: Jules Richardson [mailto:jules.richardson99@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:29:09 -0500
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] Technomatic Disaster
Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> Has anyone got any ideas?
Can you rule out the Adaptec bridge for sure (i.e. do you have a known-good
spare)? I have seen them fail before, although not often.
After that (in order of preference):
1) See if you can rustle up a manual for the drive itself. Some of them give
you a way of accessing diagnostic codes which might give more info about the
exact fault (and e.g. it might be possible to fix a speed-related problem)
2) Forced heating or cooling of the drive *might* bring it back long enough to
get data out of it. (if successful best method there would then be to clone
the contents to a working disk, as that's a lot faster than trying to do a
serial archive)
3) Pulling the cover on it might reveal some problems (i.e. I had one drive
where the coating on the magnets for the voice coil was flaking off and giving
all sorts of errors - surprisingly, cleaning all the crud out got over 80% of
the data back, which was 80% better than having a metal brick :-)
cheers
Jules
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