hal@hpscdc.HP.COM (Hal Work) (04/11/89)
When I came back in the room to check on the status of my download,
imagine my surprise when I was greeted with a task held message. The
GURU was 8700000B.00000001.
After rebooting and trying to save a file, I got the message 'Error
validating disk. Key 33330 already set.' This is my hard disk. What
happened? What can I do short of reformatting and reloading? How can
I prevent this from happening again?
thanks, Halugkamins@sunybcs.uucp (John Kaminski) (04/12/89)
In article <7350009@hpscdc.HP.COM> hal@hpscdc.HP.COM (Hal Work) writes: >After rebooting and trying to save a file, I got the message 'Error >validating disk. Key 33330 already set.' This is my hard disk. What >happened? What can I do short of reformatting and reloading? How can >I prevent this from happening again? Firstly, only the guru knows what happened :^) That could have happened because of a power surge, a temporary power drop, or any of a zillion things could have happened to cause a glitch that put the whammy on your disk. Secondly, I thought disk problems are why C-A gave us DiskDoctor. Thirdly, if you don't already have one, try a spike protector. Or, if you really want to be safe, get UPS (no, not United Parcel Service, an Uninter- ruptible Power Supply). That not only takes care of the spikes (too much voltage) but also power brownouts and drops (too little voltage) as well as honest-to-goodness blackouts. In fact, because all computers ocasionally freeze for one reason to another, when: 1.) am I going to remember to save to disk (and not RAM disk) often? 2.) is an editor going to be written that realizes that fact and save automatically? 3.) is DEC EDT going to be ported to the Amiga (ha!) or something like it that creates a history file (called a journal or .JOU file by DEC)? as a sort of "P.S." -- have any of you done about an hour or two of change mode (in EDT) editing, have the machine go down, and edt/recover your file? It's something like watching a videotape of your editing, but locked in fast forward visual search. P.P.S. -- while I'm on the subject of editors, I couldn't BELIEVE the diff between microemacs distributed for extras 1.2 and 1.3! What a speedup!
hal@hpscdc.HP.COM (Hal Work) (04/13/89)
Thanks for your input John. I fixed the problem. I do have a surge protector and a recent backup. Here's what I tried to recover and how they worked. I looked through all my notes and decided that DiskSalv would be the best first shot. My documentation was for version 1.3, but my software was 1.2. The docs said there were some bugs in 1.2, but I had nothing to lose. Sure enough, when I ran DS, I ran into the bug that was mentioned in the 1.3 docs. I got the message that my second hard disk partition was full when it wasn't. I had to reboot to get out of the program. Now, my directory structure(?) seemed bad because Dspace should that both disk partitions were empty. But, everything worked as it did pre-DS. I was concerned about using DiskDoctor because the manual only mentions floppy disks. Once again, I decided, "whot the hey". The last phase of DD is that it asks if you want corrupt files in a directory purged. Of course I said yes. What I ended up with after DD was a hard disk with nothing but directories! Now, I had no choice. Reformat and restore. Thanks Matt, Backup/Restore saved my hide.
ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy) (04/14/89)
In article <5214@cs.Buffalo.EDU> ugkamins@sunybcs.UUCP (John Kaminski) writes: >In fact, because all computers ocasionally freeze for one reason to >another, when: >2.) is an editor going to be written that realizes that fact and save > automatically? Uedit has the capability to do this. I have it set to save all altered files after 2 minutes of inactivity. You could also alter it to save after so many keystrokes, but that tends to interupt your work. -- Eric Kennedy ejkst@cisunx.UUCP