🚀 go-pugleaf

Ok, I know people are loath to speculate on things that go 'whir'
in a machine, but I've got this problem, and would like some
advice.

A few days ago, I did a RENAME operation on a file, and my
Miniscribe 71Mb HD went into never never land.  The drive access
light went through a cycle of three short flickers, and one hard
on light, for about a second, repeated ad nauseum.

I thought it was verifying the disk or something, after some
unexplained error.  I left it alone for 15 minutes, but on
return, it was still doing it.

The mouse pointer still moved, but I couldn't initiate other
tasks from the meny bar, nor did the Popcli spawn off a shell
when I requested it. Effectively, I had a dead system.

I gave it the three finger salute [Ctrl Amiga-Amiga] *and the
drive kept on being accessed*.  I then turned off the machine,
and waited 15 seconds, and turned it back on - instead of the
characteristic Miniscribe 'whirr, whirr, clunk' initialisation it
went straight into the previously described 'flick flick flick,
hard on' cycle of activation.  As far as I could tell, there was
no HD head movement occuring [with the A2000's fan, and two hard
drives running, its hard to hear the phone, never mind a single
seek operation in a HD!  :-)].  The machine would not boot from
the Rodime, and I started to panic.

I turned it off again, waited 30 seconds, turned it on, and still
no joy. I said a few rude words, in a loud voice.

After leaving it off for five or so minutes, I tried again, and
was greeted with the familiar 'whirr whirr clunk' Miniscribe
initialisation sequence, and everything is fine. The machine
booted up of the Rodime, and on accessing FH1:  I got no
verification error.  I read all the files [copy #?  to Null:] and
got no read errors on the device. I'm at a loss to explain what
happened. The file I attempted to rename was not renamed, and to
avoid any problems, I just deleted it.

Now, two days later, the drive has started to make seemingly
random 'head seek's' without any HD activation light showing.
There is no cycle, it just goes 'whirr' every now and again. The
first two times, I checked the drive with 'dir fh1: all', with no
problems. It's happened twice since then, in the past two hours,
and I'm hoping if I ignore it, it will go away.

This is a ST506 Miniscribe 3085 71M MFM drive, running off a
2090A commodore HD SCSI/ST506 disk controller, which also
supports a Rodime 44Mb drive. I have been using the Miniscribe
without any problems at all for the past 18 months or so, when it
was suitably interfaced to my A1000. On the A1000 it was
positioned sideways [drive on edge], in the A2000 it is
positioned horizontally in the 5.25" bay provided.

Has anyone got any clues as to what is occurring [esp.  people
with Miniscribe drives who know what I mean by my cutesy 'whirr
whirr clunk' initialisation description]

I checked for virii. Multiple ways.

I would greatly appreciate some advice.

Addendum:

This evening the drive spontaneously went into remission. With
its 'flick flick HARD' activity light going. I was sure nothing
was being done - my Amiga was sitting still, whilst I was reading
all about Un*x so that I could get up to speed on using RUNX and
ACSnet.

Since I hadn't been doing anything to the drive, I tried a few
'dirs' and things, but only succeeded in getting the stuff from
some drive buffers.  When I attempted to write something to the
drive, my machine locked up. [Mouse pointer moves, but no I/O
possible on either hard drive, or floppie.]

After turning my Amiga off and back on again, I was back in
action. 

On a wild hunch [and this is totally unsubstantiated, so don't
accuse me of rumour mongering - yet! :-)], I decided to remove
the MSH Messyfilehandler and messyfilesystem as well as the MSH
mountlist entry, and reboot.  That was something like three hours
ago.  My Miniscribe drive hasn't been making any random 'seek'
noises since then, and it seems to have fixed the problem.

So: Conjecture would point to MSH, as the variable which caused
this weird and wonderful circumstance to occur.

File under 'weird', eh!

Salient information.  A2500/20 2Mb 32bit wide memory.  4Mb of
Fast memory on Microbotics 8UP!  card, 1Mbyte CHIP ram, software
running at time of crash:  Workbench, Popcli III, FleetCheck,
Cygnus Ed Professional, Amiga_shell [NEWCON:  device].

Any explanations welcome.

   _l _  _  Andrew Clayton.      I post .
  (_](_l(_  Canberra. Australia.       . . I am.