george@mnetor.UUCP (George Hart) (08/13/86)
I've run into a disk-related problem which has some interesting characteristics. While copying the contents of a subdirectory, I paled as I watched the drive stutter and the dreaded "General Failure" message appear. I isolated the problem to one file, which happened to be a modified hershey font file that I've been playing with for some time. Investigation revealed: 1. "type" and "copy" both produced the "General Failure" message. Retries didn't help but ignoring the error allowed the whole file to be read with some extraneous fluff at the end. 2. PC Magazine's "diskscan" program reported 1 error when reading a 128 sector group that included the file. However, when reading each sector in the group individually, no error was reported/discovered. 3. The file could still be read completely and correctly by a Basic program I've been using (my copy of MSC V4.0 hasn't arrived yet :-). 4. Microsoft Word V3.0 could read the file without difficulty. 5. "recover" prints a "X out of X bytes recovered" message but no solution. 6. Changing "BUFFERS=20" to "BUFFERS=10" in my CONFIG.SYS file made the *whole problem* go away! "type" and "copy" work quietly and "diskscan" doesn't report any errors. The only residual effect is that the end of file mark seems to have been zorched appending some extraneous data. The machine is a PC running 3.1 with a 20meg Seagate on a short WD controller. It has 640k (about 600k available) and the usual assortment of cards and things. The only real change recently has been the installation of V5.02 of the Microsoft bus mouse driver that came with Word 3.0. So, do I have a bad disk or is it a DOS problem? Or both? Or neither? -- Regards, George Hart, Computer X Canada Ltd. UUCP: {allegra|decvax|duke|floyd|linus|ihnp4}!utzoo!mnetor!george BELL: (416)475-8980
balcer@gypsy.UUCP (08/18/86)
I have had the same problem on my Visual Commuter (clone) with two floppy drives running MS-DOS 2.0. It seems that if I set BUFFERS to be any number greater than 16 that I get "hard disk errors." My guess is that your problem is related to the same bug (undocumented feature). Marc J. Balcer Siemens Corporate Research and Support 105 College Road East Princeton, New Jersey 08540 !ihnp4!Siemens!gypsy!balcer