Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!waikato!phil
From: phil@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: SUM II's Achilles Heel
Message-ID: <2108.272d4ef9@waikato.ac.nz>
Date: 29 Oct 90 20:59:21 GMT
References: <1091@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Lines: 40

In article <1091@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk>, nick@cs.edinburgh.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell)
writes:
> The Achilles Heel seems to be the following: to put it rather bluntly,
> if something spits on the header of a soft partition file, it's f*cked.
> Each soft partition is held as a single contiguous file on the main
> (physical) volume. 
> [...] But, what if the partition file becomes corrupted so as
> to be unmountable? You can't recover the contents, because you can't
> mount it (SUM Recover reports an error not described in the manual and,
> er, refers you to the manual...). And, you can't recover the partition
> file itself in the enclosing volume because it's still there, but just
> corrupted.

Here's another:  I optimised my hard disk so that I could fit an 800K partition
on it.  Then I changed my mind and decided to go for 1 Mb.  So I defragment
again and go off for a cup of tea while it's doing it's work.  When I come back
there is an error message on the screen which told me nothing (something like
"Unexpected error") but might as well have said "I've just f**ked your data".
I suspect it was something to do with having made all the files nice and
contiguous, it dodn't want to go and chop them up again to shuffle them about
to give me my 1024K.  

It works fine if you don't try and do (admittedly silly) things like that, but
I was testing it (and I did have backups - I wouldn't test something like that
without a backup).

On the subject of testing, I've just been given Norton Utilities for the Mac to
try out.  I'll make some comments on it and comparisons between it and SUM II
if anyone's interested (in due course).
> 
> On a vaguely related matter: has anybody else noticed that the help
> screens for the SUM Partition DA have junk characters in the top right
> corner?

I just checked (it's the first time I looked) - yes - looks like what happens
when there's no character for the ASCII code - I wonder if they checked?
-- 
Phil Etheridge (phil@waikato.ac.nz)                 /\  /\   -+-,--, .--, ._
Computer Services/Mathematics & Statistics         /  \/  \  / /--< /--  /
University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ.              /        \/ /__.) \_  /