[comp.sys.atari.st] Boot diskette broken - What the hell happened?

jbe@pcsbst.UUCP (jbe) (06/26/89)

Can anyone help me or at least tell me what possibly happened?

I have an 80MB hard disk on my ST and a boot diskette which sets up certain
things. After working for a few hours (gulam, emacs, arc) I tried to
reboot only to discover my boot diskette was empty.
*** I did not delete it!!! ***
Fortunately I have a backup ( a bit old, but works) and looked at the
diskette with fseditor and everything still appears to be there, only
the desktop says it's empty, as does gulam (ls) etc. I tried running
undelete and fsck on it but these didn't work.

Q. Could this be a virus? (I was busy un-arcing PD-binaries from usenet
   at the time)
Q. How can I repair the diskette? As I have a backup it's not too bad
   if I lose the stuff, but it would interest me to know how to do it.
   (I'm sure it's easy for a hacker.)

Thanks
J-B
--
Name    : John-Brown Evans      Company : PCS GmbH, Munich W-Germany.
UUCP  : ..uunet!unido!pcsbst!jbe;       jbe@pcsbst.UUCP

-----   Language without meaning would be meaningless -----

danscott@atari.UUCP (Dan Scott) (07/08/89)

in article <866@pcsbst.UUCP>, jbe@pcsbst.UUCP (jbe) says:

> Q. Could this be a virus? (I was busy un-arcing PD-binaries from usenet
>    at the time)
> Q. How can I repair the diskette? As I have a backup it's not too bad
>    if I lose the stuff, but it would interest me to know how to do it.
>    (I'm sure it's easy for a hacker.)

Virus?  I dunno, perhaps, however because it is is disk you seem to
use all the time it may be just a simple case of media failure.

If the files are simply market as 'deleted' then just about any
disk-doctor type program can be used to 'un-delete' the files (as long as
you didn't write something else to the disk of course).  If the directory
is totally messed, then something more powerfull (i.e. not PD?) may be
needed that will allow you to directly pull the information off the sectors
directly....not a pretty chore....

Dan/Atari Corp.