From: ronald@lowt.phys.tue.nl (Ronald Aarts)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix
Subject: RS/6000 floppy drive problems (summary)
Date: 5 Oct 92 11:15:11 GMT

In comp.unix.aix I wrote:

>Hello aix-world,
>We're using a RS/6000-320 with an internal 3.5" floppy disk drive. This
>drive seems absolutely broken. Nothing works, no read, no write, format,
>.....  In fact it is the second drive that stopped working.
>We heard a rumor that this is "normal" when you don't use the drive
>frequently, because it gets dirty (due to the fans ?).
>A cleaning set should work, but didn't.
>And now we wonder. Are we the only people in the world suffering from this
>"normal" behavior, or is this a common problem.

The replies I got are included below. I also included another posting that
I saw in the mean time.

One other thing to mention is that our faculty has five 2 year old RS/6000-320
of which ours is the only one with a completely broken floppy disk drive.

Thanks for the replies to:
  - Ross Boswell
  - Thomas Giesecke
  - Scott Hudson
  - John Rodkey
  - John Stewart

The conclusion is left as an exercise to the reader :-).

Ronald Aarts

Eindhoven University of Technology  | Internet: ronald@lowt.phys.tue.nl
Physics Department, P.O. Box 513,   |    Phone: +.31.40.474213
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands  |      Fax: +.31.40.453587
================================================================================
I've had a 6000-320 running for 19 months with infrequent use of
the 3.5" fdd and no problems at all (yet)!!
================================================================================
My experience has been that the RS/6000 floppy drive is very unreliable.  I
haven't had it completely fail in the manner you describe, but, back when I used
to try and actually use the thing, it often trashed sector 0 on disks, making
them useless junk and denying me access to data I really needed.  This could
happen during read, write, or format.
================================================================================
Hi.  We've had our 530 for 1 year now, and we use the disk
'infrequently' - maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks.  We've not experienced
the problem you describe.  We also hope that we don't in the future
experience it.  The explanation you've received sounds bogus to me - the
kind of explanation one might make for something that was total
unexplainable from an SE's experience with the machine.  You could test
it by using the floppy daily (whether or not you really needed to), and
then when it fails again (which it probably will, since the explanation
given you was bogus), you could point out that what they said was hokey.
================================================================================
no no your not the only person. Our company owns two RS6K 320 Modells,
we have had the same problems over and over again.
The funny thing we are using our diskdrive regulary IMHO its not 
a problem of unregular use. Maybe it depents on dust, but if saw the
same thing on 5xx Modells with the big cases.
================================================================================
We've just had the diskette drive on our RS6000 system fail for the third
time!  The drive is only used to install new software and has failed the
last 3 times (most recently this evening) we have had to install software.
The previous failures were back in February and April (which gives you an
idea of how rarely the drive is used).

IBM is always prompt at fixing the machine, but I'd really be much happier
knowing why the drive fails so regularily.  It shouldn't be an environment
problem since The machine is located in our air conditioned machine room
unlike the much more numerous desktop Sun workstations we have.

If anyone else has seen these type of failures and has an idea of what is
causing them I'd love to hear from you!
================================================================================
IBM replaced the diskette drive on our RS/6000 earlier this week and it
failed again the next morning!  This time they are going to check several
other components such as the Standard I/O Planar and Redrive Card.
================================================================================
--
Ronald Aarts
Eindhoven University of Technology  | Internet: ronald@lowt.phys.tue.nl
Physics Department, P.O. Box 513,   |    Phone: +.31.40.474213
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands  |      Fax: +.31.40.453587
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix