Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!portal!atari!apratt
From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: The DANGERS of TURBO-DOS
Message-ID: <1039@atari.UUCP>
Date: 15 Apr 88 19:57:55 GMT
References: <1687@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 22

From article <1687@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>, by wolf@csclea.ncsu.edu (Thomas Wolf):
>> [TurboDOS's problems with media-change]

> This wouldn't be a problem on a hard-disk, would it?

Unfortunately, yes: just as your thumb is hardware which can eject a
disk, your forefinger can reset the machine.  This can happen with
more regularity (say) than on a UNIX system, because it's so easy
to lock up the system from a stupid user program and force a reboot.

The only bad thing which could happen with the ROM GEMDOS is unclosed,
newly-written-to files will be lost, and the data clusters either remain
free or are orphaned.  But if TurboDOS delays writes even longer, you
could lose a lot more. 

I encourage people not to use TurboDOS -- I know I wouldn't trust my
hard disk to it.  If they didn't think media-change through, what else
didn't they do?

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt