Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Thomas_E_Zerucha
From: Thomas_E_Zerucha@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Hard Disk Crash
Message-ID: <8627@cup.portal.com>
Date: 1 Sep 88 01:04:17 GMT
References: <5037@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <441@forty2.UUCP> <8364@cup.portal.
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.3273

Simon Poole writes:
>while your program sounds quite nice, it would fail miserably on two of the
>four partitions on my hard drive (guess why?)

If they are some kind of partitions for a Mac emulator or Idris or OS/9, m
program wouldn't recognize them at all.  There is a HD optimizer for the Mac,
(Symantic Utilities) but I haven't tried it.  There are many for the PC, so
one that runs under PC-Ditto should work too.  I don't know about anything
for Idris or OS/9 or any other type.

If you check out most of the optimizers for the PC (those that I know about),
no matter how "safe" they are they recommend backing up first and rebooting
afterword, just because no matter how "safe" my program might be, I can't be
sure that someone else has figured out a way to compromise the safety, for
example a non-writethrough cache would wreak havoc if my program aborted
aborted before it had a chance to update.  Also if directories happened to be
cached and it didn't recognize a media change or something and rewrote the
old information over the reorg'ed FAT's, it would also trash the disk.

As for my utility, I *HAVE* hit reset right in the middle of the optimization
without data loss, and the worst that can *theoretically* happen is extra
:"orphaned" files which I have also gotten when hitting reset.  It is designed
to be this robust and foolproof, but fools can be even more clever.  We also
have something in this country called tort liability which I have never had
the chance to be part of, and never want to, but I have to be careful with
my claims simply because of this.  Even if it is 99.98% reliable, I can't
take a chance on not disclaiming all this stuff.