Focus drive fixed

["Mark Cummings" <figjams@primus.com.au>]

A while back there were a few people having problems with their Focus HDDs,
including myself. I had problems booting mine, but booting a system floppy
would mount all the vols. Then running a Check Drive said it was OK !.
Eventually I decided to low-level format it using the Focus Format Utility.
If I ran the Verify Drive option I kept getting different block errors which
was confusing, but I had read advise that this utility was not the best
method so I assumed I should ignore those and use ProSel instead (if I could
ever get that far). Normally I could load System 6 software onto the HDD and
rebooted it 1 or maybe 2 times, before the HDD would play up again, and I
was back to low level stuff again.
I had to make a decision on whether the fault was the HDD itself, or the
interface. I didn't have any access to another 2.5" mechanism or knew anyone
near (within 2000miles) that could test my drive for me, so I decided to
bite the bullet and get a new HDD mechanism. I bought a 750M Apple ROM IBM
mechanism as it seemed to fit Alltechs recommendations.

Anyway, low-level formatted it, partitioned it and set up System 6 on the
boot partition, and so far it all seems sweet. Passed every test so far.
Except I'm still not happy yet with 25 partitions, but I hope to fix that
soon, after some more testing.

The only conclusion I can come to on the old drive is that the problem was
in the partition table, and not in the actual partitions. this might explain
the problem booting it at least.

Others with similar Focus problems (that are out of warranty, or are just
cheaper to fix yourself) should consider replacing the drive, which is the
cheapest part of the whole thing. Of course if you have access to another
IBM/Toshiba 2.5" HDD to experiment with, that's a better option.

Mark