7 Nov
2001
7 Nov
'01
9:05 p.m.
On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
I would label this as consensus rather than opinion,
Sellam, as I've
What kind of "consensus" is a consensus of one?
actually done very little with Apple][ since the early
'80's, but I've
had to deal with the problems others have brought to me, which were
trivially solvable by plucking out the offending component, namely the
Apple][ disk subsystem. Once the disk subsystem has been gone, the
Apple][ was quite solid and predictable, in ways other than, "well,
it's work for another hour or so ... then the disk won't be readable
any longer ...."
Fairytales.
I think your recollection is tainted by the
Apple-colored glasses,
It's not a "recollection". As I said, I still use my Appple //e to this
day. Before my //e I had a ][+ I used for a few years. NEVER did I have
the problems you say you encountered. Your whole story is suspect. I
hate to say it, but either the hardware you folks in your particular part
of Colorado were getting were all defective, or you just didn't know how
to use them.
Did you always put disks away back in their sleeves? Did you refrain
from throwing them across the room or leaving them on
the floor where they
could be stepped upon? Did you keep your pocket magnets away
from them?
Did you avoid putting them in the dishwasher to clean them?
The problem was not the drives. It was the diskettes you used and the way
you treated them. Plain and simple.
Since you seem to know something I don't, which is
always possible,
particularly in this arena, perhaps you can clear up what one can do
to recover from a disk failure "hang" when the Apple cannot read its
diskette.
First of all, what operating system are we talking about, and what
software are we running?
If it's DOS 3.3, any disk error will result in some sort of error message
and a return to the command prompt (if that's where you were). If there
is an error encountered during the execution of a program, and the program
is doing no error trapping, the program will break execution upon the disk
error, returning you to the error prompt. If the program is doing error
handling, then it will usually provide you with some sort of error message
and a recovery option. If the program is written poorly, who knows what
may happen. Perhaps THEN the computer will lock up. Does this describe
YOUR experience? If so, what shit software were you running?
All this pretty much applies to ProDOS as well, although ProDOS was a tad
more robust.
This sort of thing seems to happen about once per hour
if one is
running software the actually uses the disk drives, e.g. every two to
three seconds, continually for extended periods. It even occurs when
running CP/M on the Apple drives. That's why nobody I know did that.
Like I said before, this is only happening in your partiular installation.
If I were you, I'd look for high voltage (kilovolts) power lines running
within 1 foot of your disk drives that may be causing eletromagnetic
interference. Being that that is most likely an unlikely scenario (at
least I would hope so, but it might explain your odd behavior) then I'd
next look for any very powerful magents that you may have sitting near
your disk drives. I would also have the room with your disk drives
exorcized for any demons that might be in the area. Have your local
pastor come in with some holy water.
If you know what to do to avoid having to restart and
to avoid having
to give up on work entered manually since the last disk save, then
please, quote me the page and line in the documentation where it's
described. That's all most folks had to go on back when the Apple was
a current device.
I can't answer your question. I would need more information from you. SO
far, the only information you've given is "it doesn't work". You're
a
tech support nightmare.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org