[Techtoolslist] Fluke 9100 hard disk write errors

[andy]

hi all... again.

 Well, i've hit another brick wall in my 9100 upgrade and was wondering if 
anyone else has come across this before.

 Basically, the 9100 is refusing to write to the hard disk... i'm getting 
'write error' every time i try either to copy DR1 to HDR, or even saving a 
calibration/settings file to HDR... the story so far:

 It all went wrong when i booted my 9100 from system 6.0 floppies, and 
copied all three system disks DR1 to HDR... when rebooted, the 9100 failed 
to load, throwing up a mixture of Error loading OS F7, or OS F4, and then 
proceeding with ERROR 244 or ERROR 205 and prompting to continue through a 
mire of root software errors. end result, the machine hung after the last 
error 'application exited abnormally internal error 102' - if anyone wants a 
full list of error codes, let me know...

 So, someone suggested formatting the hard disk, booting from floppies, and 
copying them  over again... so i duly booted from the service disk, and 
formatted the drive, choosing option 5 - no dma. two options, 4 dma, 5 no 
dma... wasn't sure what to pick and couldn't find any info in the manuals 
about this. picked 5, and formatted. After doing a physical format / 
verification, results were : 74 bad (sectors) - 19.13mb available. I booted 
the v6.0 floppies and went to copy DR1 to HDR, and immediately got a write 
error....

 So i got bored and I upgraded the roms in my machine (from 27256 V3.0 to 
27c512 V5.0) thinking it might help, can't make the problem worse i thought 

:)


 I then retried the process again and it still failed.. So i checked if this 
was a system disk copying problem, or a general hard disk writing problem, i 
went into 'setup | save system settings in userdisk' and got the very same 
write error, indicating it must be a global hdisk writing error, not a 
problem with just the disk copying section.

 So then i booted to the service disk, and formatted the hard disk once 
again, but this time took option 4 - dma... same as above, booted in from 
floppies and i still get the write error.

 I have the western digital interface and the miniscribe 8254 drive, cannon 
floppy, and 2mb ram, i have set the config options correctly from the 
service disk utility, and tried numerous times copying to hard disk, with 
this write error all the time now..

 i even made up a set of old 4.1(b) system disks (this was what my system 
had on it before) and tried the same things, and still this write error..

I turned on the disk error reporting from the service disk, and when i get 
the write error now, it shows the address as 00000001 so its the very first 
write it is failing on each time..


 Bearing in mind the drive still appears to format ok, and that i had no 
previous problems with it, do you think this write error is the drive, or 
the controller, or the software mis reporting it?

any help appreciated, or i'm going to be reduced to manually loading the 
system software from floppy disks everytime i want to use the damn thing, 
which will be a real pain as i do use the 9100 almost on a daily basis.

ta,

Andy.