info-mac@uw-beaver (01/30/85)
From: zauderer%ucbcory@Berkeley (Marvin M. Zauderer) I keep telling myself that there are other equally frustrated souls 'out there' who are using the Lisa to develop software for the Mac. We've had a tremendous number of problems with both the hardware and the workshop software; here are two that we are currently agonizing over -- can you help? The first concerns the disk drive (we think). We had been creating Mac- executable programs for quite a time, yet 'all of a sudden' the (Mac) disk to which the Lisa writes these files became unreadable (by the Mac). It would not boot on the Mac, nor could it be initialized on the Mac (an initialization attempt resulted in an 'initialization failed' message). But, strangely enough, we COULD use the disk under MacWorks on the Lisa! We thought this was fairly strange, but put up with it for a day while we thought about what to do next. Of course, the disk then became unreadable by the Lisa as well (Murphy's law?). We tried using a brand new disk, but had the same problem. So, we opened up the Lisa, played a little frisbee with the disk drive, and put everything back together again. Everything then worked fine. My questions are these: any ideas on how to recover the contents of the 'trashed' disks? Has anyone else had this problem? The second problem concerns Version 3.0 of the Workshop. We've noticed that something seems to eat up disk space at an alarming rate. Every time we use the editor or compile, more disk space is eaten. If we let the process go on for too long, we end up having fewer free blocks than is necessary to run the Workshop, and it crashes. We've been using the 'Repair' feature of the Pascal 1 disk before this happens, and that manages to restore all of our free space. We also did an 'Online' (in the File Manager), which listed a '24' under the 'Open' column for the hard disk. I haven't looked in the manual yet, but I'm guessing that means 'open files', which might account for the great loss of disk space. I may be reaching, but I also don't know what could be causing this problem. Any ideas? Your help and/or encouragement is greatly appreciated. The until-recently free-of-charge 'Lisa Hotline' has now been magically transformed into a '10 dollars per solution' service, so our budget appreciates your help as well. Cheers, Marvin
info-mac@uw-beaver (02/01/85)
From: kyle.wbst@XEROX.ARPA I have been warned by my local dealer not to install Office System 7/7 (which I also hear is known as version 3.0 ...supposedly an upgrade to the 2.0 I have) because it has the disk eating bug you mentioned. He said a fix is on the way (fat chance now that Apple is dropping the LISA). This was over a month ago and this magic fix (which was "only a couple of weeks away") has yet to materialize. What did come in the mail was a statement from Apple saying that we didn't have to pay for the merchandize sent (more indications that no fix will ever come, but you can keep for free the bum software that doesn't work). The dealer did say that the only known cure is to do what you have been doing (a hard disk repair routine). The problem seems to get worse if you are doing alot of print outs. The disk fills fast with the stuff for spooling to the printer , then never gets cleaned off no matter what you do (outside of a repair ). Depending on your work load, you can expect to spend several hours per week doing hard disk repairs (fun, huh?). I have a friend at another company who claims he has seen no problems at all with his 3.0 package, but he never does any printing so we don't know yet if that is the reason for his trouble free operation, or if he lucked out and got an advanced copy of the legendary fixed version of the software.
info-mac@uw-beaver (02/04/85)
From: ihnp4!ihu1m!gpw@uw-beaver.arpa The disk space eating problem has always been there. We had it in version 2.0. You would not notice it as often because it seems to multiply with spool printing usage. APPLE has NEVER offered any fix to us for repair of this bug! George Wilkin AT&T-Network Systems