Zip disks & RamFast

[George Rentovich <grent@home.com>]

Hi,
   I have a question that has not come up in using the Zip drives and
Ramfast. I am using the latest roms 3.01f. It is the Rev D card (small
one). It seems some of the disks show errors in the Ramfast Utilities.
When the disk was first inserted it showed no errors. This disk was
formatted by the manufacture for the Mac. It showed no errors on the
IIgs when in its original HFS format.
  Formatting it on the IIgs in ProDos showed 16 errors in the defect
list in ramfast. This is after it formatted and partitioned.
Reformatting it a second time showed 24 errors with 992k not used and 5
partitions of 19456k. I reformatted a few more times and it stilled
showed 24 errors. One more time formatting and it showed 32 for the list
of defects. Another reformat brought it back to 24.
  I have run across this before where it shows up on some of the disks
drives and not others. I have used the blocks that were in space
available. I used other utilities (IIgs) and they showed no problems
with the blocks if they are used.
  The Defect list always has them in increments of 8. That is 8, 16, 24,
32, 64. On the mac reformatted in HFS there is no problems.

   My question is, is it safe to used these unassigned (Space Available)
blocks in the partions?

   I want to use the zip disks to start backing up my 5.25s so I can
them on to a few CDs.

  Also the click of death is a broken wire on the rewrite head. It is a
fine wire about thickness of a human hair. The broken wire on the one I
seen was broken in the center. Not at either end. It appeared that it
may have snagged on the disk coming in or the slide cover for the
rewrite head.

Take Care
          Geo