mj@myrias.UUCP (Michal Jaegermann) (06/24/86)
[ munch, munch ... ] I was hit by a rather obscure bug in TOS, Below is an exact description of what happened. Does anybody else happen to stumble upon the same problem? -------- SYSTEM Atari 1040 ST. TOS in ROM (of course). One DS drive. Only operating system and basic accesories loaded. No RAM-drive at the moment. ACCESORIES (which you need to reproduce events) A disk which sometimes in a past was initialized as two-sided. Currently re-initialized as a single sided and completely filled with files. SITUATION At the Desktop, by a mistake I tried to copy one more file to the disk. Without RAM-drive I used "copy a: to b: and swap, swap, swap..." method. RESULTS Operating system happily went throgh motions. No error reported during the whole operation. First indication that something went amiss was that a directory listing looked exactly as before the operation. As it turned out some parts of a file which I tried to copy - a program file - were deposited on the disk overwriting an end of one file and a begin of the next one. Apparently some pointers in FAT for the second file were changed making the last sector of the second file its begin - at least in some circumstances. HOW TO AVOID I don't know. Be careful and tip-toe around. ----- Michal Jaegeramnn Myrias Research Corporation Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA