unbent@ecsvax.UUCP (Jay F. Rosenberg) (04/05/88)
Having spent 2 hours last night recovering from a thoroughly
scrambled FAT, I thought it appropriate to hold a small post-mortem.
The culprit *appears* to have been a shareware program called EDRAW
(Version 3.2), which I picked up as PCSIG Disk #828 from a local
university's public bbs. As near as I can diagnose the phenomenon from
the rather incredible list of messages I received from CHKDSK, what
happened was this:
I had installed Borland's Quattro spreadsheet program. As far as I
can tell (by using assorted MACE tools), when Quattro installs, it marks
various disk sectors as protected, probably in aid of finding its own
overlays. (MACE had been respecting these and not moving them about
during unfragmenting operations.) EDRAW apparently did *not* recognize
and/or respect this protection. When I used the program to make some
sketches and symbols and proceeded to save them to the disk, then, EDRAW
evidently wrote good parts of them over these protected sectors. The
result was the most incredible mess of truncations and crosslinks I've
ever seen.
Whether and, if so, how the various memory resident utilities I had
installed entered into the scenario of destruction, I do not know.
Responses, reactions, comments, and alternative diagnoses will be
most welcome. I've learned a lot from the net over the years. One
thing I learned: Keep current backups! I did. Go ye, and do likewise!
--
JAY ROSENBERG Dept. of Philosophy CB# 3125 UNC Chapel Hill, NC 27599
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