** 1 page feature / 632 words Steven Bagley **

Dr Steve's House of Upgrade Horrors

A cautionary tale by Steven Bagley...

In the lazy days of summer I decided to add a hard drive to my Atari STe. After scouring the adverts I settled on 365Mb drive which included all the necessary leads and software.
After connecting the drive to my STe I switched on the power and listened to the drive spinning up before turning on the monitor and STe. The computer booted from the hard drive, the driver software recognised the six pre-installed partitions and the drive transported me safely to the standard TOS desktop with one important difference - an extra icon for drive C:
I installed an icon for each of pre-installed partition, saved the desktop, installed the Forget Me Clock software and MagiC then rebooted to load MagiC. Next I installed SpeedoGDOS 5 using the install program which appeared to ran fine but on looking into the folder containing my Speedo fonts I found the filenames were all corrupted! I suspected the SpeedoGDOS install program probably didn't get along with MagiC so undaunted I decided to reformat the drive using the GE-Soft setup program - there were after all only a few files on the drive along with some corrupt fonts.
The format operation appeared to proceed happily, the drive was making its usual chugging noises, but after a while these stopped and the red activity light stayed on! I waited, and waited and eventually gave up and switched everything off.
After some lunch, I tried again but it still didn't work so I rang the supplier but the repair guy wasn't available and I was told to ring back later.
In frustration I tried formatting the drive one more time and typically it worked this time so I proceeded to partition the drive and re-install my software again - leaving MagiC out of the equation, just in case. After a while I noticed file corruption again and my heart sank.
Before I ordered the drive I had checked my DMA chip to make sure I didn't have one of the faulty DMA chips labelled CO25613-38 so I was confident mine was OK.
I connected the hard drive to another STFM/TOS 1.02 machine to see if I could repeat the problems I was having with my STe - instead I got a new set of problems - sometimes the drive would boot and sometimes it wouldn't!
In desperation I took the drive round to visit my Grandad's STFM/TOS 1.04 machine and it formatted and partitioned first time. Relieved, I re-installed my software and put the episode behind me - or so I thought. Several days later my NeST message base became corrupt and the whole stomach churning episode came back to haunt me again!
I spoke to my supplier who suggested the Top-Link host adapter cable might be faulty so they sent me a replacement and that seemed to do the trick.
A few weeks later I read a letter which stated DMA chips labelled CO25913-38 could also have problems using hard drives. I quickly re-assured myself I hadn't had any problems since replacing the Top-Link cable but a few days later, during a heavy programming session, my Lattice C compiler started to report invalid file errors and sure enough they were corrupt. I finally realised I'd been struggling along with a dodgey DMA chip! Since having the DMA chip replaced (around eighteen months ago) I haven't had any further trouble but it's one roller coaster ride I'll never forget!

** Captions **
** CRRPTDIR.GIF **
Corrupted directories, I've seen a lot of these!

** 1MBMEM.GIF **
Six months passed before I finally saw this!

** DESKTOP.GIF **
The magical extra drive icon I longed for

** FORMAT.GIF **
If this is the last dialog you see before your drive stops chugging be afraid - be very afraid!