Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!well!dsmall
From: dsmall@well.UUCP (David Small)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Supra, Spectre GCR
Message-ID: <15993@well.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 90 09:07:42 GMT
References: <5586@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: dsmall@well.UUCP (David Small)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 26


[The basenote lists some bizarre problems encountered with a Quantum 80-s
drive, which apparently fooled Spectre into thinking it was 105 mb long.]

	Kevin, I'm sorry I missed you via Email; I can't get to the WELL
as often as I'd like, as we're putting the final touches onto 2.5 (very
time intensive).

	I think you'll find that what happened is Supra's software left
glop in the trailing ends of the partition sector. GEM ignored it.
However, the Spectre utilities saw the glop, and somehow interpreted it
as reasonable partition data. I really have no idea how it got there;
perhaps a previous user had formatted the drive as a 100 meg unit,
and gotten far enough to stamp out a partition sector? I'm puzzled.

	Anyway, I'm glad in a way that the problem is resolved, and you've
found the top possible sector # on your drive. Another way to find this is
just to run PARTCOPY with a long sector count, from the drive to itself,
until it reports a failure.

	Naturally, there's always the possibility the Spectre software
screwed up; however, I recall *many* times seeing trash in the "bottom"
of the Supra partition table. I usually go zero it out by hand when I
find it. I'll bet that's what happened to you.

	-- thanks, Dave / Gadgets