Storage Problems

I bought an MPC2000XL a few months back and have been steadily honing my skills on this incredible box but have had major problems with storage. I bought it second hand and to my surprise and delight, it already had an internal zip drive installed (I was surprised because this fact was not mentioned on the ad spec).

The zip drive would save midi sequences OK onto disk, but when it came to more intensive data storage such as numerous samples and associated programs etc, the zip drive would crash with a "disk read" error. I took the hood off and checked connections etc, but there didn't appear to be any loose connections so I accepted that it may be a faulty zip drive.

A friend of mine gave me an external hard drive (Orb Drive 2.2gb) which I connected via the SCSI output and it worked beautifully... until the other day when it crashed horribly on me losing about three months work.

The scenario it crashed in was when I tried to create a new folder on the external hard drive. I had already created three levels of hierarchy and was about to create a fourth. I was just wondering if anyone else had ever experienced problems with creating extra levels for folder hierarchies?

Also, it could obviously be a coincidence that I've got a faulty zip drive and an external hard drive that has somehow corrupted, but my greatest fear is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the MPC itself which is causing these problems.

Any ideas folks?

The only time I've known the zip to crash like that is when you try to save too much. If your zip is close to full and you attempt to save something that goes over the capicity it will began to save and once it reaches it's max it will give you the disk read error screen. Another example atleast from my experience is to un hook the MPC's midi out connections before you go to save. This doesn't have to be done all the time but believe me it helps. The best way I could explain it is from time to time you may get a sustained note or midi message from your outgear that triggers a reset/reboot command in the MPC. hope this helps some.

Well, zip disks are not perfect - I would be less inclined to blame the drive, and more inclined to blame the disk - have you had this problem with any other zip disks?

The advice I always give is BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!! Never place all your work on one hard drive or disk, always make copies, even if it means having to save your song data then swap disks and saving it again. I keep 3 copies of everything, then it doesn't matter if one disk crashes.

MPC-Tutor wrote:I keep 3 copies of everything, then it doesn't matter if one disk crashes.

Same here.

You could SCSI to a hard drive. Better yet, i believe there is a way to scsi to your computer hard drive. So i have been told

you can scsi to hard drive, but not to your pc's hard drive....