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From: wilber@aludra.usc.edu (John Wilber)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Norton Utilties Shipped (But Still Buggy)
Summary: Failure to fix a damaged disk is not a bug
Message-ID: <11245@chaph.usc.edu>
Date: 4 Aug 90 01:57:14 GMT
References: <846@earth.cs.utexas.edu> <11148@chaph.usc.edu> <19372@well.sf.ca.us>
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In article <19372@well.sf.ca.us> bmug@well.sf.ca.us (BMUG) writes:
>OK, I checked with Steve Costa, and this is what he says:  Norton does very
>good data recovery, but he's seen 10 - 15 % problems with disk repair.  

I wish you would be more specific about what 10-15% means.  Is that 10% of 
the time a disk can't be fully recovered?  If that's what you mean, it is
definitely NOT a bug.  The fact is that the possibility of reconstructing 
the data on a damaged disk depends on the extent and kind of damage.  If you
use scissors to cut away a hunk of the disk there is no way to recover that
data.  It's not a bug, the software just can't recover data that isn't there
anymore.

>For example, we were repairing a 160MB hard disk, and superclock beeped.
>After that, all the folders on the disk appeared, but wouldn't open, and 
>the data was gone.  Even Steve couldn't recover it.  

There's not much to go on from this description (esp. what impact do you
think SuperClock had on this?), but it sounds like disk doctor just 
couldn't fix the disk because it was too damaged.  If it seems that that
was not the case, we would like to know so that we can track down the 
problem.

>These problems were reported to Norton before shipping, and tested on the
>shipping version.  

I talked to one of the Mac developers about this and he says it doesn't
sound like anything he saw in the beta bug reports.  Is there something 
more we can go on here?

Maybe we should take this matter into mail-land and stop bothering the other
netters with this. No?