Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucdcsp!gillies
From: gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: I just thrashed my Hard Disk!
Message-ID: <76000235@uiucdcsp>
Date: 17 Jun 88 08:28:00 GMT
References: <3599@okstate.UUCP>
Lines: 22
Nf-ID: #R:okstate.UUCP:3599:uiucdcsp:76000235:000:1167
Nf-From: uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Jun 17 03:28:00 1988


Well, my flames have died down.  Really, all I wanted to say was:

"It is technically possible to provide a self-repairing filesystem on
industry standard disk drives.  Xerox does this today with their
cedar/dragon file system, and perhaps also with their 6085 Pilot O/S.
I wish Apple would do it too.  Since the main idea is to add
redundancy to the file system, this can probably be accomplished in an
upwards-compatible way.  It would complement the 'easy to use interface'
with a 'safe to use operating system'."

"Furthermore, Apple's 'Disk First Aid' program seems to be technically
weak.  It has *never* recovered a bad floppy disk for me (out of about
5).  I have recovered some files using some cleverness (I ran DiskCopy
until it choked, & then read the copied floppy).  I think Apple should
supply a more powerful recovery utility (nearly as powerful as MacZap)
since most users assume that when 'Disk First Aid' fails their disk is
trashed beyond repair."

Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      PHONE: 217-244-0432
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,ihnp4,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies