Re: AAUGH! Vulcan 20 dying??

["Howard Moulton Jr." <howard334@tsixroads.com>]

Dave Althoff Jr wrote:

> I've got a Vulcan-20 hard drive salvaged from a IIgs, and a Vulcan
> controller card mounted in my enhanced //e.
>
> Some time ago, I stupidly decided to use that drive rather than the drive
> on my IIgs for archiving some text files.  Now I want to convert those
> files to HTML and put them on my web page.  It seems that something very
> strange has happened to some of the files.
>
> Somehow, at a random interval, certain bytes have been advanced by five
> ASCII codes.  For example, where I would expect to read:
>
> This is the build-up to the ride's longest drop, I think it is on the
> order of 170' into a dark tunnel.
>
> I get instead:
>
> Phms$iw the fumld-up$to the vide's$longewt$dvop, I tlink it ms$on the
> ordev of 170' mnto a daro tunnel.
>
> And why did a "T" turn into a "P" instead of a "Y"?  So far, that's the
> only one where the error counted backwards.  And the error seems to be
> popping up at a random interval!
>
> So does this mean my drive is dying?  Or should I try pulling off anything
> that isn't corrupted, reformatting the drive, and trying again?
>
> If the drive is dying, does anybody have any advice as to what kind of
> drive I should look for to use with the Vulcan card?  The present drive is
> a Western Digital WD-93028-AD, and I notice it is dated 06-01-1990.  I
> guess 11 years in two computers under two owners is a full and happy life
> for a disk drive.....
>
> --Dave Althoff, ][.
> --
>     /X\        _       _               _*** Closed for the season ***
>    /XXX\      /X\     /X\_      _     /X\__      _     _        _____
>   /XXXXX\    /XXX\  _/XXXX\_   /X\   /XXXXX\    /X\   /X\      /XXXXX
> _/XXXXXXX\__/XXXXX\/XXXXXXXX\_/XXX\_/XXXXXXX\__/XXX\_/XXX\_/\_/XXXXXX

 I'm not an expert on the Vulcan, Dave, but if you look closely, you system
has dropped bit 2 on all odd characters.
This suggests to me that you may have a bad driver chip on the controller card
attached to the drive ( though I
would have thought that the ECC check would have flagged this as bad
read/write). Or it may be that your
system ram has a bad chip. In any event, if you add the value of bit 2 (4) to
each character that is wrong, it
will be the right character. This can help you locate the defective section.
Hope this helps.

--
73's de KB1ARQ  Howard
mailto:howard334@tsixroads.com