Subject: Syquest drives (not much luck with mine)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 14:08:31 +0100 (BST)

Hi all!

Well, as you all know, I seem to be jinxed when it comes to hardware.  Well,
I have a Syquest drive, and this mail is all about the saga so far...

I purchased a Syquest 270MB drive and a few disks around last year.  They
turned up next day, and I unpackaged them and connected the drive up.  Great
I thought!

I powered the drive up, and put a disk in.  The drive busy light (yellow)
lit up, and the drive span up.  However, the drive light stayed yellow, and
there was no sign of any head movement.  Eventually, the drive span the disk
down again.

I tried another disk, and got exactly the same results, so I disconnected the
drive and examined it closely.  There is a connector on the board which carries
various signals to the disk heads - it wasn't soldered onto the board.  Ok, so
I sent it back, and got an (apparantly) later drive with various modifications
to the board (as Syquest put it, they speed the drive up).

This drive has appeared to work fine for the past year with my cartridges bought
at around the time and around Christmas.

However, I bought some cartridges last week.  Guess what?  The drive has taken
a dislike to them - it spins them up, makes the usual `zzz zzz' sound the drive
does, but this is followed immediately by a CLICK, and another `zzz zzz', and
maybe if the wind is blowing from the right direction the first stages of head
calibration.

So, I phoned up Syquest, and got a new set of cartridges sent out.  I received
these today.  I tried them out£and got exactly the same results - the drive
didn't like them.

Syquest are now going to replace the drive.

The problem is that I may be without Syquest for a while, and where's my copy
of the FTP site?  You guessed it!  On Syquest!  Ok, so don't I have a backup?
Well, yes - it's a read-only CD Rom image.  Not much good when you're updating
things to go onto the FTP site.

So, until this problem is solved, it looks like I'm going to be without FTP
image, and hence the FTP site is going to be without update until this problem
is solved.

        [Why me?  Why can't someone else have some problems?]
   _____
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  |   |       Russell King        [email-masked]         --- ---
  | | | | http://whirligig.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~rmk92/home.html  /  /  |
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  /   |               THE developer of ARM Linux              |+| /|\
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