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From: acm@bu-cs.BU.EDU (ACM)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: A different View of the value of OS/2 - it's better than UNIX
Message-ID: <14050@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Wed, 7-Oct-87 20:25:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.14050
Posted: Wed Oct  7 20:25:11 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Oct-87 11:08:37 EDT
References: <161@splut.UUCP> <177@qetzal.UUCP>
Reply-To: madd@bucsb.bu.edu
Followup-To: madd@bucsb.bu.edu
Organization: Boston University ACM
Lines: 38

In article <177@qetzal.UUCP> rcw@qetzal.UUCP (sysop) writes:
>In article <161@splut.UUCP>, jay@splut.UUCP (Jay Maynard) writes:
>> A single bad sector in the root directory of a filesystem will do the same
>> thing... [trash the file system]

Yea, but it'll do it for MS-DOS too.  In UNIX the root directory
doesn't HAVE to have anything in it (except perhaps boot image) --
just mount file systems on it.  This is what I would do.  So you get a
bad sector -- kill that cylinder and use the next one up.  You lose a
few K, is all, and restoring data is trivial because there wasn't
anything there.  Now, MS-DOS also needs only the boot image there, but
a bad sector could screw up the directory links.  This is a problem
since the directories aren't mounted, they are on that physical
device.  This is sort of a problem, wouldn't you say?  I'd still take
the UNIX method over MS-DOS's.

>> At lease I can fly 'chkdsk -f' and ....
>
>Ever try to use one of the files that this command recovers?

He has a point.  I *have* tried to use 'em.  Not too easy, let me tell
you.  Also, chkdsk -f won't fix all kinds of things.  If the FAT gets
destroyed, you're in trouble.  I don't think chkdsk will even attempt
to rebuild the entire FAT; I know that fsck DOES, and does it with
some redundancy.

>The key difference is
>*multi-user*, and one would be naive to think that a multi-user
>os is going to be trivial to maintain. (They are also naive to
>even *think* about purchasing OS/2 before release 3.2)

True.  And, true.  But they'll never get 3.2 out until they get 1.0!

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
          Jim Frost * The Madd Hacker | UUCP: ..!harvard!bu-cs!bucsb!madd
  H H                                 | ARPA:           madd@bucsb.bu.edu
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  H H                       | "We are strangers in a world we never made"