Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!umd5!uvaarpa!mcnc!xanth!kent
From: kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Kent Paul Dolan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Semicoherent flame about Amigados.
Summary: modest suggestion
Message-ID: <4038@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 12 Feb 88 11:01:58 GMT
References: <644@nuchat.UUCP>
Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 34

In article <644@nuchat.UUCP> peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Time for my periodic semicoherent flame about Amigados.
>
[...]
>Amigados is just plain flakey. Almost every disk error means you lose an
>entire track, thanks to the 1 sector per track concept (let's not argue
>about what a sector is, hey? As far as the electronics is concerned it's
>all one big sector). A good proportion of the time the lost track is
>the root track, unsurprisingly enough.
>
>Please, after you finish the fast file system... get a reliable on. It doesn't
>have to be big: 720K per diskette would be fine. But it needs to have real
>sectors to act as firewalls when corruption occurs (as it invariably does).

	Another suggestion (since I don't like giving up that much
	storage): when an error occurs writing a track, and before the
	data is lost, write the whole track to track 81, STOP ALL
	FURTHER WRITING TO THE DISK, put up a requestor for a blank
	recovery disk, suspend the calling task; let the user recover
	onto a blank disk, with a program that restores the bad track
	from track 81 and makes an exact duplicate of the disk
	creation info to make the suspended program happy with the
	disk as a clone of the damaged one, and reschedule the task.

	I find that even with disksalv, I'm typically getting back
	less than 60% of the disk data; I attribute that to having the
	process continue to try to write to a disk that already has
	serious problems.  Considering the undependability of floppy
	media, I think the driver should incorporate full write error
	recovery directly, to minimize damage to other diskette files.

	Comments?

Kent, the man from xanth.