dcw@doc.ic.ac.uk (Duncan C White) (09/20/88)
Hi there everyone, I have a problem with my hard disk: at the recent Personal Computer [World] Show in London, I bought the Hisoft FTL Modula-2 compiler for the ST. [Show price, 90 quid including source level debugger and profiler and make and resource editor] I was happily installing this onto my SH204 hard disk, using the Desktop to copy disk 3 of 4 when the blasted ST collapsed in a heap.. Vertical lines appeared on the screen, and I had to power off.. Sadly, the result is that the \M2\FTL directory I was installing into is totally corrupted: if I open it with the Desktop the ST crashes again, complete with vertical lines. If, instead, I use Gulam and cd into the FTL subdirectory, the machine doesn't crash, but ls reveals total garbage.. The rest of the disk is fine however. So, what I want to do is remove the garbaged directory and start again. What I thought might be possible is the following: Recursively follow the directory structure, [except \M2\FTL of course] and follow each cluster used by each file: Mark in an array which clusters/sectors are used. Then, when I have finished the traversal, blank the FAT entry for every cluster/sector which the array marks as unused. Now the crunch: I don't know enough about the FAT format to do this. The only information I have is from an MS-DOS book "Tricks of the MS-DOS Masters" which helpfully says "the format of the FAT is beyond the scope of this book"... it recommends the "MS-DOS Developer's Guide" which I do not have. So, I wonder, would anyone care to tell me the format of the FAT table, and any other information I might need [partition table, boot sector??] or better yet, does anyone have source doing something similar to what I want to do ??? [C preferred, Pascal, Modula-2 and 68k assembler acceptable, 8086 assembler deplored but ok, if it's all you've got..] If you care to mail me, I'll gladly post a summary of anything I get.. [post only if you can't find a path to me] Thanks in advance, everyone... Duncan. [If dcw@gould.uucp fails, try dcw@doc.ic.ac.uk] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Duncan White, | Flying is the art of aiming oneself Dept. Of Computing, | at the ground and missing. Imperial College, | -- Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks London SW7, England | for all the fish.
alderaan@netmbx.UUCP (Thomas Cervera) (09/22/88)
In article <439@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>, dcw@doc.ic.ac.uk (Duncan C White) writes: > I was happily installing [M2] onto my SH204 hard disk, using the Desktop > to copy disk 3 of 4 when the blasted ST collapsed in a heap.. > Vertical lines appeared on the screen, and I had to power off.. Is it possible that the first crash was caused by an undetected floppy media change (DS to SS) ? Than, if TOS suddenly stood in the forest, couldn't it be that it did undefined write actions to the HD ? > > Sadly, the result is that the \M2\FTL directory I was installing into > is totally corrupted: if I open it with the Desktop the ST crashes again, > complete with vertical lines. Was this your first experience with the TOS folder problem, in add ? > > The rest of the disk is fine however. If you write to this hard disk, it wouldn't be much longer ! > > So, what I want to do is remove the garbaged directory and start again. The best you can do, I think, is not to write to this disk any more :-) But, to keep being serious, wouldn't it be easier to ARC the folders you have on your HD to floppy disks, format the HD, and reinstall the folders ? Sure, this also would take at least 2 hours, but what about the time you have to spend to write such a utility you plan ? -- alderaan OP RKOpdp (RSTS/E) FB Mathematik/Informatik RKO Berlin Dieffenbachstrasze 60-61 1000 Berlin 61