Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!reed!wab
From: wab@reed.UUCP (Bill Baker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Fatal fragmentation?
Message-ID: <12219@reed.UUCP>
Date: 28 Mar 89 17:19:01 GMT
References: <2128@westfort.UUCP>
Reply-To: wab@reed.UUCP (Bill Baker)
Organization: Reed College, Portland OR
Lines: 31

In article <2128@westfort.UUCP> westfort!bluebum@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu writes:
>Has anyone ever heard of a desktop becoming fatally fragmented? I recently saw 
>a couple of floppies die right before my eyes in a way that led me to consider this 
[...]
>  I've seen a lot of disks mysteriouly expire between uses, but this was the 
>first time I've actually seen peculiar behaviour right before it occurred. 
>Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

I had a couple of disks die this way in such a way that I don't think it could
have been a case of disk failure through wear.  I was working with a disk and
trash-ejected it so that it was gone from the desktop.  When I
reinserted it less than a minute later I got the disk unreadable
message.  Then I reinserted the disk I had inserted after the first
and got the same message.  The first disk was fairly old but the
second was not, besides which two disks failing in close succession
would be a big coincidence.  I rebooted and no more disks were munged.

When I checked the disks with Fedit the desktop sector on both disks
was totally blown away (Fedit couldn't read the sector).  I haven't
had the problem again, but then I've avoided using some suspect
applications that I used right before the disks died.  Now, I haven't
heard of any virus with these symptoms so I had assumed I was just the
victim of extraordinarly bad luck, but are other people experiencing
desktop deaths?  Obviously, the way most disks are corrupted is
through the desktop dying so isolated cases are no proof, but has
anyone else been losing disks serially?


------------
Bill Baker 
{backbone}!tektronix!reed!wab