[comp.sys.amiga] Workbench bug report

hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (06/13/87)

Since I haven't heard this mentioned before, I thought I'd pass on
this bug: if there is a hard error on the diskette in the middle
of an icon, you get a guru. I don't have the number handy but it's
real reproducible....just open the window containing the bad icon,
and when workbench tries to read the icon, ka-blam!

Obviously workbench is not checking for errors, and it proceeds with
bad information in the icon structure. Reading the same icon with
a custom written C program just produces the read/write error requestor,
as expected; no crash.

I don't know if it matters, but the disk in question had a whole
directory full of icons, and several tracks were bad, trashing several
icons in the directory. My C program successfully examined all files
on the disk without producing anything more than the read/write
error requestor.
	Doug Merritt		ucbvax!ingres!hatcher (thru Jun 28)
			or 	ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug

paulz@hpspdla.UUCP (06/16/87)

Your program would appear to be a good tool for recovering from defective disks.
Any chance of distributing it?

hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (06/20/87)

In article <4160002@hpspdla.HP.COM> paulz@hpspdla.HP.COM (Paul Zander) writes:
>Your program would appear to be a good tool for recovering from defective disks
>Any chance of distributing it?

Sorry, didn't mean to mislead anyone. I use "disksalv" to recover defective
disks, and am not aware of anything better. The program I referred to was simply
reading files for another purpose (my as-yet-unreleased "filetype" program),
and I mentioned it simply to prove that simply reading the trashed icon
files would not trash the system, but instead it was what Workbench did
*after* reading the trashed file that crashed the system. Presumably it
doesn't notice that the read of the file didn't work, and proceeds with
the icon data structures that it *thought* it read, causing a crash.
	Doug Merritt		ucbvax!ingres!hatcher (thru Jun 28)
			or	ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug