Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!natinst!rpp386!mark
From: mark@rpp386.cactus.org (Mark Lehmann)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Hard Drive Woes: HELP!
Keywords: hard drives, problems, desperation...
Message-ID: <17336@rpp386.cactus.org>
Date: 21 Nov 89 00:59:00 GMT
References: <6832@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: mark@rpp386.UUCP (Mark Lehmann)
Organization: Mark Lehmann
Lines: 35

In article <6832@portia.Stanford.EDU> zimm%portia@forsythe.Stanford.EDU (Dylan Yolles) writes:
>One of my hard drive partitions is turning into spaghetti. By that I mean
>that when I attempt to write a lot of stuff to it (maybe 2 megs) the new
>files are severely corrupted, the directory looks funny, the computer
>crashes, and so on. I believe that the drive can't write to certain
>sectors (I recently noticed a <write fail> message from the ICD utilities).
>What should I do?
>
>a) Should I reformat the partition and hope there are no real hardware
>problems with the drive itself? As far as I can tell, the ICD utilities
>won't allow one to reformat a single partition: how does one accomplish
>this? (I DON'T WANT TO REFORMAT THE WHOLE DRIVE!!)

I don't want to sound uncaring about you problem, but it looks like
you have encoutered the nasty "40" folder limit that TOS incorporates.
This will mess up you drives extremely well.  You can try to backup your
good partitions to floppy disk, but there is not much you can do about 
the corrupted files.  I encountered this twice.  Even my backups were
messed up, and when I restored the files to the freashly formated
drive, I re-created my problems.
 
My suggestion is to backup as much as you can onto floppy disks, and then
reformt the drive.  Then make sure to get the FOLDRxxx.PRG program from
a BBS or other source.  Atari wrote it and it is available for no-charge.
Replace the "xxx" with a number between 100 and 999.  I use a value of 150.

Hope this helps.
 
Mark Lehmann

-- 
+------------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Mark Lehmann                       |                                   |
| mark@rpp386.cactus.org             |                                   |
| {bigtex|texbell}!rpp386!mark       |                                   |