CompuServe Messages

I seem to be having a strange problem with my hard drive. For months it will work perfectly. However, every so often, the read/write head will begin to sound like it's oscillating. It sounds like the head is vibrating back and forth between adjacent cylinders. The oscillations start out minor. They only happen occasionally, and stop after a minute or so. However, after a few days, they become more and more common. It eventually reaches the point where almost every hard drive access causes it. When this point is reached, the oscillations can only be stopped by accessing the hard drive a second time (or a third time or a fourth time…). After two weeks or so of this, the oscillations will suddenly stop, and the hard drive will work perfectly for another six motths. Sometimes the oscillations occur right after a disk access, and other times they begin DURING the access. When the oscillations occur during an access, hard drive access is slowed considerably. The speed is comparable to when two different programs are accessing the same drive at the same time. I'm using a 100 meg Quantum hard drive installed on a Supra WordSync interface, inside an Amiga 2000. I have no other expansion boards in the machine, and a single floppy drive. Curiously, this problem never occurred until I installed Kickstart 2.04. I'm not sure whether I'm using the ROM-based or the disk-based Fast File System, but since I never used HDToolbox to change my Rigid Disk Block, I suspect that I'm using the disk-based FFS. (I'm not sure if this is related, but whenever I run HDToolbox it tells me that "Some drives have been added or removed from the system " and that I should select "Save Changes to Drive." It then shows the status of my hard drive as "Changed". I haven't selected "Save" yet because I don't know what the result will be.) I'm using version 1.10 of the Series II Supra software. — Matthew Rimer 73500, 1167