LS-120 External Drive Problem 1

[jfelis]

My secondary 486 system has a weird problem. I use a pair of External Imation LS-120 drives to transfer data between the primary system at work and the secondary system at home. The system at work is usually switched on for 5 or 6 days at a time and runs perfectly. For quite a while now the secondary system has had an intermittent fault when it is switched on. I tried bring the second drive into work and exchanging it and it worked fine at work, so the problem has to be in the box.

During bootup there is the message "ASPI disk manager not found" and there is no E: (ie LS-120 drive) when bootup is complete. The problem is worse in the summer, and also, on occasion the drive has suddenly disappeared in the middle of being used (grr) usually after the machine has been on for an hour or so. I figured it was a heating problem, but didn't worry too much because it's only a backup machine (I've got four 486's and a pentium at present). However, about three weeks ago. I accidentally left the machine switched on when I went to work and it was left on for the whole week. Now it wont recognise the drive at all and my
backups are piling up on the floppy's. All the rest of the system (a:3.5" floppy b:5.25"floppy c:harddrive d:RAMdrive) seems to work fine.

I don't know much about hardware, and it can cost up to $80
an hour to call out a professional, which is a big bite for me as my income is only about $320 a week. Can anyone suggest any freeware or shareware diagnostics which I could use to pinpoint the problems?

I really like the LS-120 drives because of their backwards compatability to 1.44 drives. I just wish they had had a better uptake so that the disks would be cheaper!

Thanks in Advance,
Jacq.

 

[zepper]

Have you tried downloading the latest drivers from the Imation web site? What sort of interface is the drive using? If parallel port, have you changed settings on your Parallel Port in the BIOS setup? It's been a while but I seem to recall that the parallel port needs to be set to a specific mode for best results with external LS-120 but I forget which mode.
Lastly, just try removing the external drive from its shell and use it directly as an intertnal IDE drive. That gives the best performance on LS-120 anyhow...
.bh.


He who dares not offend cannot be honest. -- Thomas Paine.