abrams@cs.columbia.edu (Steven Abrams) (03/24/90)
A friend of mine is having a problem using a PC-File DB application written by an allegedly good consultant and asked my advice; I saw no clear solution and wondered if anyone out there had any suggestions. The situation is that the index files keep getting corrupted for no apparent reason. It is a very random occurance, but it happens nearly every day. I haven't had much time to look at the application itself, but I'm no PC-File expert. For your information, the problem appears on both a Hyundai 286 and a Hertz 386. Both machines have 30 Meg hard disks and are running MS-DOS 3.3 and PC-File DB version 1.1. No other files on the disks get corrupted, and the consultant claims that the program runs fine on his machine. The results were not duplicateable one day that the machine was brought into the dealer for testing. The only difference that day was that the printer was not connected, so no report generating routines were run. It seems that when no reporting routines are run at home, this problem persists anyway. The problem has gotten to the point that my friend claims he can regenerate the indexes, shut the machine off, and turn it on in the morning and find the files corrupted. Also, I ran a chkdsk on the drive and found 200+ lost clusters in 9 chains. The .CHK files that were generated appeared to be parts of index files. Questions: 1) Are there any known PC-File bugs in version 1.1 that could cause this? 2) Does PC-File handle all of the indexes itself or does the application programmer really have to concern himself with this? 3) Is there something that the users could be doing inadvertently that causes this? 4) Are there any known viruses that only affect PC-File? I checked command.com, and it was fine (the file size matches a distribution disk I have), but didn't have the appropriate tools to check the hidden DOS files. 5) Is there any possibility that the environment is responsible for this? The consultant believes this to be the problem, but I can't believe that an environmental prolbem would only affect PC-File indexes. My friend is at his wits end, since he's lost major amounts of time on this. The consultant is ready to say f*ck the whole thing and is beyond the point of being helpful. As I said, I'm not a PC-File expert. My database experience is quite extensive in the R:Base environment, and indexing problems are usually related to people doing bad things, like rebooting during update procedures, not closing the files before shutting the machine off, or routines that repeatedly read/delete/write records in lots of tables at once. The latter of these was due to an R:Base bug that Microrim did fix after I reported it. I'm ready to go with blaming the consultant, since the hardware is all very sound. The consultant is convinced that his programs can't be the cause of all this havoc. Assuming that we all agree that it is his software that's the problem, does anyone out there, preferably a PC-File expert, have any suggestions as to where I could look or tell the consultant to look? Please respond via e-mail, since I'm having enough trouble keeping up with alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork, never mind useful groups like these! ~~~Steve -- /************************************************* * *Steven Abrams abrams@cs.columbia.edu * **************************************************/ #include <std/dumquote.h> #include <std/disclaimer.h> -- /************************************************* * *Steven Abrams abrams@cs.columbia.edu *