Message-ID: <479@utcs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-Mar-85 10:34:12 EST
Article-I.D.: utcs.479
Posted: Mon Mar 11 10:34:12 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Mar-85 11:11:23 EST
Organization: University of Toronto - General Purpose UNIX
Lines: 25

I just came back from SHARE in Los Angeles and there was a Birds of a Feather
get together called IBM PC/AT user experience. 

Hard disk problems are not a rumour. They are a reality. It was something
almost all in the session had in common...

An interesting comment came up. When the hard disk seeks it makes a fair
amount of noise. This is normally only heard when using the format
program from the diagnostics. (The diag format does a physical format
where as the regular format does a logical format) The other time this
noise is heard is when the disk is about to cave in. It does a few
retries and makes noises when doing it. Thus you can tell when it is
about to croak by the quality of the audio it produces.

I also hear that there are bugs in the backup program in that occasionally
the floppies do not get the proper identification info written on them
even though all the data really is there. When you try and restore
it croaks unless you manually fix the floppy. There are updated 
versions of backup that no longer have this "feature".

I have not got an AT but this is what I learned from a bunch of AT
users.

t.jones