Have you ever had a damaged Hermes Shared file (garbled names of the HTxt resources, etc. that you could not delete or replace)? Have you ever had to restore a backup of the Hermes Shared and find out that your user data is two weeks old?
Fix Shared To The Rescue!
The Hermes Shared file becomes damaged in its resource fork. This is where all of the menus, logon, logoff, etc. files are stored. When Hermes BBS crashes for one reason or the other, the Hermes Shared file is not closed properly and, sooner or later, the resource fork becomes damaged.
My experience has shown that the data fork (the location of the user data records) has never become damaged from the above scenario.
Fix Shared allows you to capture all of your current user data records and place them in an undamaged Hermes Shared file.
Fix Shared also zeros out the message pointers after it is through copying the user records to the good Hermes Shared file. This will save your users from needing to type “//QSCAN” when they log on in order to use the “N’ and “Q” scans to read new messages. NOTE: Users will still be presented with messages they have previously read, but once they re-read these, all will be back to normal.
Instructions
Fix Shared isn’t all that friendly of an application but then you shouldn’t have to use it all that often so it does its job and not much else. Follow the directions below and you will be all set.
1) Make a copy of the damaged Hermes Shared file. And put it somewhere on your drive where you can easily get at it.
2) Create a new virgin copy of the Hermes Shared file. To do this hold down the ‘Command’ key while booting Hermes. When it asks you to find the Hermes Shared file choose ‘New’ and Hermes will create a new ‘Hermes Files” folder which will contain a new ‘virgin’ Hermes Shared file.
3) Run Fix Shared. It will ask you to first locate the BAD (damaged) Hermes Shared file and then the GOOD (new) one. Open both these files using the standard open dialog that it will display.
4) Fix Shared will thrash your drive around for a few seconds and then quit. You should now have the current user data records from the damaged Hermes Shared file in the good Hermes Shared file. It with display a alert with the result of this operation. It should say that the data was sucessfully recovered. If not, it will report the OSErr that prevented it from recovering the data.
5) Copy the GOOD Hermes Shared file back into your Hermes Files folder.
6) Launch Hermes. You may want to do a quick check of the user data, but all should be fine. You will have to redo the message sub, transfer directory and menu stuff but the support BBS has good instructions on how to recover some of this stuff with ResEdit. The important thing is that the user data is now recovered.
Distribution
This file can be freely distributed. Fix Shared is free to all registered users of my externals. All others should submit $5 to the address below if you would like to use it.
Problems
Any problems should be reported to me on Mulligan’s Valley (203) 772-4485.
