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From: bmug@garnet.berkeley.edu (BMUG)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Hard drive woes
Message-ID: <26214@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 11 Jul 89 15:42:56 GMT
References: <8367@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: bmug@garnet.berkeley.edu (BMUG)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <8367@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> mha@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Mark H. Anbinder) writes:
>I'm having a lot of trouble with my internal Rodime 1400RX.  When I try
>to fill it with files copied from the old drive I'm replacing, and I
>get to some point on the drive (not sure where) I can't copy anything
>else onto it.  
>
>The symptoms?  When I try to Finder-copy ANYTHING on, even something
>small, the Finder hangs at the "Updating desktop file..." stage of the
>copy procedure.  Everything has seemed to copy properly until that point,
>but when I eventually restart the machine, obviously none of the files
>I've just copied are visible.

The fault lies not in the drive but in the Mac OS.  The problem you're
experiencing is due to the fact that the Desktop file, which sort of
keeps track of directory information, icons, etc., has a maximum number
of resources it can handle.  When too many files are on the disk, it
simply gets corrupted.

The short-term solution is to use Desktop Manager, which comes with
AppleShare.  There are some trade-offs, but it allows you to put a lot
more files on your hard disk.

The long-term solution will come from Apple in the form of System 7.0,
which, I believe, addresses the Desktop file problem.

John Heckendorn
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