#100+ hard disk
5 messages in this thread
I have a Rainbow 100+ with what might be a flakey hard disk. It appears to
have been gradually "going south" and now won't even boot reliably. I guess
I can get it to boot once. Then it hangs when I try to run Wordperfect. A
subsequent attempt to boot using setup, ctl-setup fails with some sort of
disk I/O error message.
I just bought a power conditioner. So, that's not a problem (any more).
What I've got is the 20MB disk that Suitable Solutions sold with the
"I-drive". Suitable Solutions is now out of business. Can anybody tell me
what drive they sold or what goes wrong with it.
Obviously, I'm interested in any fixes or replacement drives.
Bob,
Almost certainly, the disk in question is Seagate's ST225. (I say this
not out of any knowledge of what Suitable was shipping, but just based on
the fact that by far the lion's share of 20Mb disks sold into the pc-level
market are ST225s.)
Some people say the ST225s are just inherently unreliable. I don't quite
buy that… I know several that have been running Just Fine for a *l*o*n*g*
time.
You can probably pick up an ST225 on the open market for $200-300, if not
less.
Someone else may be able to tell you what the classical problems are with
this drive, or how to diagnose it further… I don't know.
-Bill
I once read in some obscure magazine article there is a problem with ST-225
drives where firmly tightened screws holding the logic pc board will cause
some mechanical alignment problem in the HDA to which it is mounted.
Specifically, slightly loosening the screw on the side of the board closest
to the front panel seems to help this situation. I have tried this on
friends' pc-type systems with at least enough luck to get all the files off
the drive..
Bob,
Which version of DOS are you running? Jerry Miller discovered a problem
with DEC's 2.11 (I believe) that resulted in progressive corruption of the
hard disk. The details were published in Rainbow News, together with
software to diagnose and (if I remember correctly) fix the problem.
But I truly don't remember very clearly. And DOS 3.10 from Suitable
Solutions was, of course, fixed.
–Len
Bob,
Just out of curiosity have you opened your machine up? If not, and you're
not afraid to do it <grin>, you might want to open it up and check out all
of your cable connections. I had a similar problem once in the past and it
was due to my Hard Disk controller cable loosening up. I don't know if
this will work or not, but it's a real easy "fix". Just try reseating all
of your cables to see if that solves the problem.
Bill