Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!peter
From: peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Semicoherent flame about Amigados.
Message-ID: <661@nuchat.UUCP>
Date: 20 Feb 88 18:34:25 GMT
References: <644@nuchat.UUCP> <3311@cbmvax.UUCP>
Organization: Public Access - Houston, Tx
Lines: 51

In article <3311@cbmvax.UUCP>, daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes:
> > Time for my periodic semicoherent flame about Amigados.

> You're actually flaming the trackdisk.device...

OK, I'm flaming the trackdisk.device, I... *what*?

> And the main problem isn't that full tracks are read and written in one pass.

You mean there's no way to avoid that????

> The problem is that, each time that full track is written, it could start
> anywhere.  So, given enough writes, if you have a place that'll drop a bit
> on that track, it'll eventually wind up having your important data written
> on top of it.  

Yeh, that was what I was getting at. Well, now...

> The ideal solution would be to have trackdisk start it's writes at the same 
> place every time.

Yeh, that should solve the problem. Perhaps.

> Then you should be able to add bad block mapping -- even
> though the blocks aren't distinct, as long as they get written in the same
> place every time, and you avoid placing meaningful data in a known bad
> place, your reliability will go up quite a bit.

Yeh, that's the ticket. So, when are we going to see the fix?

And the fix for the Delay(0) bug, too. I have this funny feeling that it's
partially responsible. I've removed most of my resident junk, and it hasn't
gotten any better... but you never can tell.

Does anyone know if wkeys or snipit have the Delay(0) bug in them?

> The root track contains the bitmap, which gets rewritten all the time, so you
> would expect that to be the first to go.  Fortunately, the way DOS formats
> the disk, you can loose ROOT and BITMAP and still recover everything.  Of
> course, you'd rather not have to recover it, eh?

Yeh, that's true. These days I'm using DiskSalv more often than dPaint.

> Amigas can read and write PC-DOS compatible files on PC formatted disks.  That
> says to me that block syncing is also possible.

Why? MS-DOS doesn't care where sectors start.
-- 
-- a clone of Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva  `-_-'
-- normally  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter                U
-- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.