🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi folks!

Well, after talking to several people who have been having the same hard drive
problems as myself, I can only suggest the following:

Do *not*, whatever you do, buy a Risc Developments internal 20 MByte drive for
the A3000 -- at least, until they update their firmware!  These problems are
common to all owners of this drive that I have met:

(a)  If you format the drive with a directory size of 256, you get the
     following problem:

-    when creating new files (not copying), if the file reaches some mysterious
     limit in size, the A3000 will freeze.  The pointer will stop being movable,
     the hourglass will stop moving, and control-break will not reset.

-    after this has happened, the file which you were part-way through creating
     will be undeleteable.  If you try to delete it, the machine will freeze
     again.  You *can* rename (including moving) and read the file.  You cannot
     write over the file.

-    this happens fairly commonly!  The only way to get rid of the files is to
     reformat the disc.

-    I suspect that the 'mysterious size' is when the length of the file
     exceeds the space in the free-size map where the file is put.

(b)  If you format the drive with a directory size of 512, you get the
     following problem:

-    files will mysteriously corrupt!  For instance, I copied ChangeFSI to the
     hard drive, and it stopped working.  I could still run it from the floppy.
     So, I deleted it, and tried again.  Still not working...

-    you cannot trust *anything* on the hard drive.  I have saved a file, then
     saved a copy to floppy, then exited the application and tried to load the
     version from the hard-drive.  Corrupt.

(c)  The only two sizes which you can use for directories when you format the
     drive are 256 and 512.

(d)  Both problems occur under RiscOS 2 *and* RiscOS 3.1.  The operating system
     is *not* the problem here.

So once again, do *not* buy these drives, util such time as the firmware on the
podules have been updated by Risc Developments.
								Ug!