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- From: TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
- Subject: Prosel not quite perfect
- Message-ID: <920730012207.018464@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL>
- Date: 30 Jul 92 01:22:00 GMT
- Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
- Distribution: world
- Organization: The Internet
- Lines: 39
-
- I recently had an annoying (fortunately not disastrous) problem with a
- hard drive partition that Prosel was unable to fix and wondered if there
- would have been some other way of dealing with it. I'm not quite sure
- how it happened, but somehow what I think was a small part of the
- partition table of contents (or whatever it's called) got damaged. None
- of the GS/OS or Prodos file systems would recognize the partition's name
- or format. Some of Prosel's utilities did recognize it, some did not
- (for instance, it did not show up on the prefix/volume list at all, but
- did show up as a device on the device list.) The prosel volume repair
- utility *DID* know what the partition's name was and reported only two
- classes of errors: wrong length on the partition's main entry and a 150
- or so unused blocks. I didn't have it fix the unsused blocks, but did
- have it correct the length. It did so and reported no directory
- structure errors when I tried again. It seemed pretty clear it was
- walking the whole directory tree that I thought was there, since it took
- as long as it usually did. But, to no avail; even after forcing prosel
- to try a main directory repair (with which it seemed to have no trouble,
- finding no errors to correct) nothing, including other parts of prosel,
- was able to recognize the partition as a readable prodos volume.
- Ultimately I ended up reformatting it and reloading it from backup.
- Luckily it was the partition on which I have all my software, so even
- though it had been longer since my last backup than it ought to have
- been, nothing terribly unrecoverable was lost (mostly GS/OS version 6,
- which I'll get around to reinstalling when I have time.) Is there
- anything around that would have allowed me to patch up what I suspect
- was a very small error in the boot block or partition table of contents
- without forcing a reformat? (Whatever there is that records the
- separate partitions was OK -- my other two partitions, mercifully, were
- just fine; somehow this one lost whatever it is that allows GS/OS-ProDos
- to recognize it, even though enough was left that Prosel seemed to be
- able to walk the directory tree just fine.)
-
- TMPLee@dockmaster.ncsc.mil
-
- p.s. -- I suspect one of two causes for the error (a) I discovered the
- fan inlet on the hard drive was blocked by dust; no errors since that
- was taken care of , or (b) I got frustrated when an application program
- appeared to get into a loop and hit reset at exactly the wrong time (or
- a combination of the above.)
-