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- The Perils of Peggy
- (Part 1)
-
- by
-
- D.FOWLER2
-
- It was a dark and stormy night.... uh, this is a scholarly
- publication? Sez who?
-
- I've been messing with computers for six years. In that time I've
- learned that things do go wrong from time to time. I must say that our
- Kaypros are extraordinarily reliable. We've never had a serious
- electronic or mechanical problem. Oh, I've had to vaccuum the cat
- hairs and Oreo crumbs out of the keyboard occasionally, and I've
- cleaned the disk drives once or twice, but nothing beyond that.
-
- I can remember only four or five times when I have had any disk
- reading problems. Never have the problems arisen because of the disk
- drives, and rarely have they been serious. Once my Perfect Calc
- program committed suicide on me. In my foolish youth I scrambled a
- WordStar disk by storing on top of my computer, right over the monitor
- with its nice strong magnetic field. Data-wise, Perfect Calc
- spreadsheets sometimes get corrupted when one bit flips from 0 to 1 (or
- vice versa). I fix those with my text processor. I had a dBaseII file
- send a few letters into italics on me. Again, one bit had switched
- from 0 to 1. I added a filter routine to the command program to get
- rid of that problem. Nothing major.
-
- Think of how fragile our data is. All that information is stored
- as tiny bits of magnetism in a thin coating of "rust" on a floppy
- plastic platter. It's read by a delicate bit of electronics as the
- platter spins at 300 RPM a fraction of an inch away.
-
- Think about it and you get this sudden impulse to back up your data
- Right Away. Because something could go Very Seriously Wrong. As
- recently happened to my long suffering spouse, Peggy.
-
- She produces an Alumnae Newsletter for her old summer camp. This
- year it has to get out in time to round up everyone for the reunion up
- in New Hampshire in June, so she was really hammering on it. All the
- various parts of it, about 45 single spaced pages, were on one disk (of
- course). Well, there she was, churning along on the table of contents
- and she went to save her work and right in the middle of the save, with
- no warning, Everything went CRASH! "BDOS ERROR ON B: BAD SECTOR."
-
- Naturally, she had been going to back up the data onto another disk
- Real Soon Now. She'd been walking the tightrope without a net and the
- rope broke. That's always the way it is. I've never heard of a disk
- crashing just after you have backed things up.
-
- She did not throw a screaming fit. She didn't even mutter under
- her breath. The silence was frightening.
-
- When something like this happens, I get called in (though Super
- Hacker I am not). A quick check and I knew we were in trouble.
- WordStar floundered like a wounded albatross when asked to do anything
- with that disk. Just asking for a directory of the disk produced a
- spastic grunting from any drive it was in. I got the sinking feeling
- that nothing short of an act of God was going to read that disk, IF the
- files were still there at all.
-
- Feeling somewhat akin to St. George, I shouldered my nerd pack and
- ventured into chaos. My first reconnaisance was with NSweep. After
- being prodded past its "Read Error" message with several <Return>s it
- managed to penetrate the wreckage. It did succeed in listing the
- files, but could do nothing with them.
-
- It was obviously time to bring in the heavy wrecking equipment. I
- reached for my rusty old (7.7) version of DU.
-
- DU is the ultimate Disk Utility. DU is to NSweep as a large
- backhoe is to a shovel. It is Mr. Goodwrench's Garage, as opposed to
- the $8.95 26 piece socket set you bought at K Mart. It is ... well,
- you get the idea.
-
- DU is also to be used VERY CAREFULLY, because you can easily dig
- the hole you are in a great deal deeper, and then pull it in after you.
- So, magic wand in hand, cloak of invisibility enfolding me, brass
- lantern lighted and held aloft, I tip-toed in, constantly on the watch
- for fearsome Grues.
-
- DU looks at the designated disk in great detail. Once you tell it
- exactly where to look, by track and sector, you can ask it to show you
- what is there with the (D)ump command. It will display (in hexadecimal
- code) every byte in a sector, and (if it is a text file) a
- "translation" of it into the ASCII.
-
- The first thing DU did when I invoked it and asked it to look at
- Track 1, Sector 1, was make the drive holding the ravaged disk make a
- lot of noise, (but good noise, as I'll explain later). It then
- informed me, and I quote: ++ READ failed, sector may be invalid ++.
- Then it displayed what it had found.
-
- My worst fears were confirmed. What should have been the directory
- of the files on the disk was trash. Some file names were legible, but
- not all. Worse, on the line below some of the names, where there were
- supposed to be file addresses it was Chernobyl.
-
- You know, of course, that the directory track is not there just so
- when you give your computer the DIRectory command it can tell you what
- you've got. It is there so the computer can find the files in the
- first place. Trash your directory track (or, for you IBMers, your File
- Allocation Table [FAT]) and those files might just as well be on the
- moon, or on an anchovy pizza, take your pick.
-
- Baaaadum! Baaaaadum! Baadum,baadumbaadumbaadum.
-
- Had Jaws eaten Peggy's newsletter? Will our Fearless Hero be able
- to plumb the turgid depths and retrieve the Golden Treasure? Will
- faithful Nurse Stella discover that Dr. Jameson is dallying with the
- mysterious amnesia patient in Room 214, who (unknown to Stella) is
- really her half-sister by her step-father who is Dr. Jameson's evil
- and licentious long lost great-uncle? Tune in next month.
-
- (To be continued)
-