Today I tried to save to disk from a Unison CME that surely hasn't had its floppy drive exercised in about 16 years. I get a "formatting failed! err: 10" when trying to format a disk, and "FAILED to save" (the all caps screaming FAIL was a nice touch, ETC, but no exclamation point on that one?) when saving to disk. The drive starts and spins and does all its normal old-timey vocalizations, and deposits a 0KB file on the disk and then quits. Tried several disks, fresh and used. I don't see an error 10 in ETC's error message chart. Anybody?
Legacy Unison Floppy Drive Error
- Thread starterColin
- Start date
How do you know that there's zero data on the disk ?. I assume you don't have Light Manager, the Unison off line software, you could check there.
In any event, this is definitely worth a call to tech. support, they can tell you what the error code means. Hopefully the drive isn't dead, you might end up with a new (used) processor as this stuff is out of date by about 16 years or so.
In any event, this is definitely worth a call to tech. support, they can tell you what the error code means. Hopefully the drive isn't dead, you might end up with a new (used) processor as this stuff is out of date by about 16 years or so.
Unisons are 3-1/2 inch drives. There's something about disc size i'm supposed to remember, or DD/HD something.
It's a standard FAT formatted disc, so if you format it, and stick any file with a .cfg extension on it, you should be able to see the file if you stick it into the processor and navigate to Load from Floppy and look through the directory. If it can't read the directory....I bet bad drive.
Also, formatting in the processor can help....esp. for a poorly aligned drive.
Generally, when the processor does save to disc, it seems that it accesses the drive for a few secs, does something else, then starts the drive up again to finish. As a last ditch, I have gotten bad/flakey drives to write by slightly pushing the eject button as the drive starts to spin.
The good news is that you can replace the drive without effecting whats in flash so you should be able to retrieve the config. Just dont press Reset in frustration too often to cause the config to dump.
Also, formatting in the processor can help....esp. for a poorly aligned drive.
Generally, when the processor does save to disc, it seems that it accesses the drive for a few secs, does something else, then starts the drive up again to finish. As a last ditch, I have gotten bad/flakey drives to write by slightly pushing the eject button as the drive starts to spin.
The good news is that you can replace the drive without effecting whats in flash so you should be able to retrieve the config. Just dont press Reset in frustration too often to cause the config to dump.
Funny you mention this. I recently had to replace the compact flash cards on 2 Paradigm systems. Seems the cards get written and read from frequently, the config is NOT in internal ram. If the cards start to fail, they Cascade fail, then processor is dead. Thus good practice to replace cards every 3 years or so. I installed a new Unison system in 2004 which was the beginning of Paradigm. That was 18 years ago. Wondering what ETC has in the works to replace that, it's long in the tooth as well.
Those meddling kids and their new fangled machines!
MRW Lights
Well-Known Member
Eh not to drive this thread off the rails but.... there was a manufacturing issue with a series of CF cards used circa mid 2010's that caused this issue. ETC has since replaced the card and any ACP utilizing the "old" cards can receive a 1 time replacement under warranty. If you're constantly making changes to your config this can wear the card out faster, but it should last theoretically through the lifetime of the device....
My more curious question would be what constant changes are you making to your config, why are you making them and is there a better way to make them? If it's simply updating presets from a remote record button on a touch panel that shouldn't cause an issue as that only changes information in the director and doesn't rewrite the directory. An entire config shouldn't get updated that often...
and to the point of replacing Paradigm... that's not going to happen anytime soon. Components and interactivity are updated over time, but paradigm is here to stay....
RickR
Well-Known Member
One more nail to drive in,
Unison Legacy disk drives are not easily replaced. I understand the driver software is hard coded, so no updates. There once was a product claiming to translate, but check with ETC before buying anything!
Back when Paradigm was introduced, I was told it was designed in modular form so upgrading and repairing would be easier.
Unison Legacy disk drives are not easily replaced. I understand the driver software is hard coded, so no updates. There once was a product claiming to translate, but check with ETC before buying anything!
Back when Paradigm was introduced, I was told it was designed in modular form so upgrading and repairing would be easier.
Not making "constant changes", never stated that. The way we discovered one failing card was having had to change a password on some preset access, the code got out to too many people and some incandescent looks were getting constant use when they should not have been, with many subsequent lamp burnouts. I think first time in 2 years we made a change. We could not access the processor via network and laptop, tried a load via USB, that showed us the failing card.
MRW Lights
Well-Known Member
That honestly sounds about right as the expected behavior with the failing cards. I misunderstood your post about the writing and reading from the cards. Unless a change is being made to the card they're not actually written to often which is where the problem seems to stem from and sounds like was your experience. Why those cards failed that way most often someone smarter than me probably figured out. Swapping the cards seems to have made all the difference and in fact we had to replace 3 so far in our network, but we have one from a generation of cards prior that's been going for well longer than our cards that died after 3 years...
