Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!linus!mbunix!jcmorris
From: jcmorris@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Joseph C. Morris)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Linkage error in FAT (Help?!?)
Message-ID: <37242@linus.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jul 88 15:33:45 GMT
References: <1459@tahoe.unr.edu> <1180039@hpcvlx.HP.COM>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: jcmorris@mbunix (Morris)
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA.
Lines: 18

In article <1180039@hpcvlx.HP.COM> bw@hpcvlx.HP.COM (Bill Wilhelmi) writes:
>                                                          Anyhow, I  
>recommend the Norton Utilities for FAT recovery.

So do I, but with one word of warning: Norton won't handle a disk with a
loop in the FAT unless you use the /m switch which (I think) is part of the
Advanced Edition only.  At init time NU builds an allocation table and doesn't
recognize a trashed FAT, resulting in a loop.  Once you figure out which
directory allocation is looping and patch that then NU works wonders.

The problem in my case was a FAT with an error which should have been trivial
to detect: a file (actually, a subdirectory) had a FAT entry which pointed
to itself as a result of my finger check while trying to rebuild a disk   
which had been scribbled on as a result of problems with an InBoard/386
system.  The directory was identified because CHKDSK looped sending nastygrams
about file allocation errors...

Joe Morris