Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!pacbell.com!att!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unreplyable!garbage From: preston@LL.MIT.EDU (Steven Preston) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Problems with opticals, and npd Message-ID: <9104220753.AA09551@LL.MIT.EDU> Date: 22 Apr 91 11:53:25 GMT Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Lines: 33 >>>>> In article <1991Apr18.034258.18830@cs.umn.edu>, cattelan@mermaid.micro.umn.edu (Russell Cattelan) writes: > ... we have had a few people (including myself) that have had > problems with the opticals disk not being reconized by the drive > anymore. Basically what happens is that when the disk is put in the > drive, it spins it up and then imediately spins it down and ejects > it. > I really would like do get this data back. Is there anyway to do > something like a fsck on the disk to try and repair it? You can fsck an optical disk by saying fsck /dev/r0d0a (to a shell) with the optical drive empty. The OS will prompt you to enter an optical disk. Same goes for initializing; say disk -l -i /dev/rod0a with the drive empty. See the disk(8) man page. However, I had an optical go south, and fsck was unable to repair it to a mountable state. fsck gave an error (something like UNABLE TO WRITE BLOCK n) every time I ran it. The OS1.0 reference manual gave me the advice "see a guru" for this error message. Anyway, I was able to write a program that retrieved all but at most 8 of the files on the disk (The disk had stuff ftp'ed off the net on it, none of it irreplaceable, so I didn't back it up). If you continue to have troubles, let me know and I'll send you my code. -- Steve Preston (preston@ll.mit.edu)