Does my 1040STe have a virus, or is it just broken?

[Hulsie]

Hello! I am a devoted ST fan, and own a 520ST and 1040STe. They both work perfectly, except for the fact the my 1040STe's internal disk drive will instantly corrupt any disk (giving you that "Drive A is not responding..." message) unless the write-protect tab is switched. This happens about 60% of the time I try and save anything to this drive, and it happens 100% of the time whenever I try to "save desktop" to the disk. Could I have a rare Atari virus? Or do I have a faulty system?

[Nukey Shay]

Not a virus...since there is no way for a virus to corrupt read-only memory. Does this happen even during disk READS with protect off? If not, I'd say that the drive speed is probably a bit slow.

[LinkoVitch]

It does sound like a virus. BUT as Nukey Shay said, they can't infect ROM. So what are you booting your machine from?

 

If it does this even if you boot with no disk in drive (or an unformatted one), then it may be worth running a disk head cleaner through the drive or replacing it. may be that simple.

 

If you are booting from the same disk, I'd try booting from a different one, if you are booting from a HDD get some virus scanning software.

[Hulsie]

Yeah, it does this no matter what I boot from. It makes no difference if my hard drives are on, or if I have a disk in the drive or not.

 

And it does seem to be able to read okay, it's just saving that messes stuff up. For example, I can play autoboot games in drive A and they will run fine. But if I try and save my game to a disk, there's a good chance it will become corrupted.

 

If my drive is running slow, is there any way to speed it up? I know I have a drive speed testing program from a START magazine disk, I'll have to bust it out and give it a go. Also, where can I get ahold of a head cleaner?

 

Lastly, is there any way to "turn off" my internal drive, and somehow designate an external drive as being the A drive? I have a few ext. drives that can save data fine.

[LinkoVitch]

I would either try cleaning your drive, or replacing it with one of the mechanisms from one of the extrnals that you have.

 

If you have a standard Atari external drive you most likely be able to just drop it in place of your internal one (once you remove it from it's case obvioulsy). Not very difficult job to do.

[Nukey Shay]

I'm not sure about the ST drives, since I only had the 8-bit ones. But in those, you would turn a small screw (near the power input) inside the drive to adjust the speed. All computers have drive adjust software, so there should be something for the ST.

Anyway, it sure sounds like a speed problem (since on the 8-bit, the drive would create bad sectors during disk writes if the drive speed was slow).

[LinkoVitch]

3 1/2 inch drives I think use auto calibration, they have a small magnet attached to the flywheel of the disk spindle which is senced by a small reed switch. I think this would ensure proper speed of the drive, I haven't seen any adjust screws on the drives ever (3 1/2 inch ones I mean).

 

I would put it down to a dirty or damaged drive head,

[Hulsie]

Thanks a lot for all your help! I'll take that sucker apart, see how the setup is, and try some of the ways you all suggested. and I'll let you know how it goes.