Disk drive terrors

[uerics@mcl.ucsb.edu (Eric D. Shepherd)]

Over the course of the past year or so, _all_ of my disk drives have
managed to become unusable, and all of them exhibit the exact same
problems, which leads me to believe the problem is something simple that
effects the entire SmartPort chain, as opposed to individual devices.

My hard drive works fine.  But disks connected either to the SmartPort or
through my PC Transporter all fail.  I can no longer format disks, writing
fails about 60% of the time, and reading fails about 50% of the time.
It's totally unpredictable.  Trying a few dozen times will often manage to
get the data across, but disks seem to get damaged in the process (of
course, I can't tell, since the drives constantly report I/O Errors
anyway).

This has gotten terribly important to correct since my hard drive's
directory structure has been damaged and I desperately need to back it up
and reformat it!  But I can't back it up without my floppies working!

I'm going to open the case and check to make sure the PC Transporter isn't
connected wrong, but I don't think that's the case.

This is also important because I need to send out update disks to some
registered users of one of my programs, and I'm already a week late.

Any suggestions/ideas?

- Eric S.

--
Eric D. Shepherd                   | Apple II Alliance Charter Member
InterNet: uerics@mcl.mcl.ucsb.edu  |           ACM Member
FidoNet:  1:206/2713 Eric Shepherd | Programming Law #1: "When in
AOL:      Sheppy                   | doubt, rewrite from scratch."