info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (09/08/84)
From: John Clark <clark@rand-unix>
My apologies if this territory has been covered before.
Since acquiring an external floppy drive, I have on a couple of occasions
inexplicably had disks trashed beyond repair. This has only occurred on
disks in the non-startup drive, and only after having copied--via the
Finder, and with apparent success--one or more files from the startup to
the non-startup floppy. The symptoms are only obvious after having ejected
the non-startup floppy, when it is later reinserted in one of the drives.
These symptoms are:
1. The drive sings its initial 3-note refrain twice, just like it does for
a brand new disk, and puts up the dialog, "This disk is unreadable...
initialize?..."
2. The damaged disk, even if it is a valid startup disk, does not boot;
you get the sad Mac, with code F0064, if I remember correctly.
3. None of the programs I tried (Write, Paint, MacTerm, Examine File, Disk
Utility, and various others) accept the disk, e.g., to look for files;
always, the disk initialization dialog comes up.
4. Disk Copy (the 4-swap copy routine) rejects the disk as unreadable.
5. The "command-option key" disk repair trick doesn't work; you still get
the sad Mac.
What all this amounts to, is that the Mac seems to behave as though the
damaged disk is brand new, never formatted. I had been under the
impression that the Mac (Finder?) almost NEVER loses files; directories and
such, perhaps, but never files. If my files are intact, I sure haven't
figured out how to access them. Am I overlooking something?
The file copying that apparently precipitated the problem seems, in
retrospect, to have been innocuous enough. I've since reinitialized the
disks, but I think I copied stuff like MacTerm and several of its docs,
some MacWrite docs, one or two SUMacC programs, and such. Nothing
"protected" or anything like that, and--fortunately--nothing of any real
critical importance. I didn't pay very close attention to potential
causes, because the disk damage was only obvious upon later attempts to use
the disk. Also, this behavior seems sporadic; I haven't been able to force
its occurrence. It's possible, I suppose, that there's a hardware problem
in the external drive, but I really don't have any basis for believing
that.
With this sort of thing happening, it's hard not to be paranoid. Has
anyone else experienced this problem? I'd be grateful for any ideas,
suggestions, or fixes.
--John Clark
clark@rand-unixinfo-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (09/19/84)
From: Hess@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA I've had a similar problem which I chalked up to the drives being out of alignment with each other. Why did I decide that was the problem? Well, I put the disk that wouldn't boot and was supposed to be unreadable back into the external drive and had no problems booting off it and reading it. Now that you mention it, it seems highly unlikely that the new disk drive was out of alignment with anything. Anybody else run into this sort of problem?