Author: Shalroth (wwwcache-c.lmu.ac.uk)
Date: 04-19-2001 12:27
I've had some similar interesting experiences with HD mechs. I have a 10Mb (I know...) ST-506 drive in an Apricot computer (same version of GEM as the ST :) that has works perfectly and has done since 1983, although a lot of that has to do with the fact it spent ten years in a cupboard at my old school...
I have an 800Mbyte IDE drive that was in my Toshiba Laptop running windows 95, which though excessive cumulative mechanical shock (I dropped it a bunch of times) had amassed around 15MB of bad sectors - which I reasonably assumed was because of the droppage causing physical damage. I bought a new 1.09GB drive for the laptop and put the 800MB drive in my NEC 486 laptop (with Gemulator it's the closest I'll have to a laptop ST) and Norton Disc Doctor found exactly the same bad sectors in the same places. This was under DOS 6.2.
I figured I could live with the bad sectors because it wasn't mission-critical.
Then I got an Amiga 1200, and put the drive into that. Partitioned and formatted to AmigaDOS with Commodore HD toolbox (say what you like about the Amiga - I'm a staunch Atarian but I have no problem with the amiga at all) and the bad sectors disappeared. It worked perfectly in there for about 6 months, until I got an Acorn A3020. The drive went in there, and was reformatted under RISC-OS using ADFS format, and it still works fine, no bad sectors at all.
So basically, PCs suck. But didn't we know that?
TTs rock, BTW. I had a 105MB SCSI drive with my STE and Mega, and when I got a TT last year I used it as a main drive in there, attached to the ACSI port (the drive was powered from the TT despite being in an external SCSI box - the TT is in the biggest PC tower case I've ever seen. I'll put some pics up some day). When I got my 1GB SCSI mechanism working on the TT SCSI bus, all I had to do was copy the files from the old drive to the new one at the desktop. It was surprisingly easy (although I did use Magic6 and Thing! so it was painless).
I'd given up on that drive - I tried it in my ST, TT and PC and it didn't even power up despite being 'known good'. The guy I bought it from thought it might have been damaged in transit but there was nothing obviously wrong with it. I was messing around with it before throwing it out, and I wanted to see how broken it was, so I attached a drive LED to it to see if it got power, and it worked fine! I thought it was too much of a coincidence, so I hooked the drive back up to the TT and nothing happened - the LED wire had come out. So - I jammed a jumper in there and the drive is working smoothly in my (massive) TT. I've never seen a Hard Drive that doesn't work without a LED attached before - so it's here as a warning.
Then there's the story of the 540Mb drive I trashed in my STE with my Spectre GCR cartridge - that was the MacOS that destroyed the parition table, and no computer I had could resurrect it. That was quite annoying because physically the drive was fine, just unusable, so I had to junk it.
And there's the 80MB IDE drive in my Acorn A5000 that reported hundreds of bad sectors until I gave it a whack, now it works fine (the drive heads must have been misaligned - I don't know, it just worked).
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