On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Geoffrey Oltmans wrote:
Speaking of.... I've got a couple of old MFM drives (10 and 20 MB of a variety whose name and model #'s escape me, I wanna say Tandon, but not sure). They seem to work fine when I initially format and partition, but as they run for a while, they get more and more unreliable. It seems to be a function of how long they've been running for rather than a predictable pattern of bad tracks sectors? Are there any good sources of troubleshooting info at the controller level for these old drives?
Well, that's normal. The usual procedure is to let the drive warm up for 10-20 minutes before formatting. And it is also normal for some models that they must be reformatted after, say, a couple of months or years, depending on make and manufacturer. The Rhodime 50MB drive in my IBM 8550 is such a beast. My procedure is to run Norton CALIBRAT to reformat the drive losslessly.
Christian
