[37564] in Hotline Meeting
workstation damages floppy disks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (kausel@MIT.EDU)
Tue Mar 25 15:13:41 1997
From: kausel@MIT.EDU
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Cc: kausel@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 15:13:36 EST
Hi,
I have a Sun SparcClassic (Serial No. MIT-0282129) "Pulse" located in
my office (1-271). From time to time, I must transfer files from/to this
machine from my PC sitting next to it. During the past year or so, I have
often (but not always) experienced problems with the workstation in that it
damages diskettes and renders them useless. Furthermore, I am absolutely
certain that it is the workstation and not the PC that causes the problem,
because I encounter the same problem regardless of what PC I use to carry
out the file transfer.
The symptoms during an errror are as follows:
- I insert a (PC formatted) diskette, either blank or with files,
- next, I "mcopy" a file to the diskette
- during transfer, the worlstation reports an error message, and stops
- the diskette drives becomes unreachable from the window used
to carry out the transfer (including the "eject" command)
- the diskette becomes unreadable in the PC. Use of Norton Utilities
to attempt recovering the diskette often fails, with reports
that the boot sector is irreparably damaged.
Having already lost a box full of diskettes, I need to take corrective action.
Eduardo Kausel
1-271
3-5336
