woodside@ttidca.TTI.COM (George Woodside) (01/20/88)
In article <19880118223421.6.JRD@GRACKLE.SCRC.Symbolics.COM> jrd@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM (John R. Dunning) writes: >I tried to use TURTLE to back up my Supra hard disk. Everything worked >peachy until trying to write the seventh floppette, at which point it >barfed, saying that it had encountered a fatal error writing the >Ramdisk. I tried it twice more, and it barfed the same way on the same >file every time. I punted the file, and it then picked a different file >to barf on. I then wised up and did incremental backups, and it did >about 7 more disks, and then got the same error. All the files that it >was trying to copy were fine, no apparent corruption on the hard disk. >It appears to be corrupting its ramdisks in some obscure way. Anybody >seen this? Anybody got any ideas? First, as usual, check to be sure you have removed all /AUTO programs except the hard disk driver, and any accessories. Be especially careful of accessories which do not register themselves, such as those associated with DESKCART. Second, be sure you have the most current version of TURTLE, which is 2.16. Your problem sounds like those which occur in one of two situations: 1) some accessories and /AUTO programs take more memory than you can spare and still get all the parts needed for TURTLE into memory (TOS, RAMDISK, TURTLE, Screen, etc.) Others (such as the Control Panel) cause some errors to occur well after things have been running along. A last ditch effort to get around the problem: After removing all the other /AUTO programs, place the proper TURTLE RAMdisk into the /AUTO folder and re-boot your system. This allows more RAM for TURTLE and TTLEXEC to execute. See the TURTLE documentation for which RAMdisk to use. Using this technique, I can run Beckemeyers Hard Disk Accelerator with 16K of buffers and back up on double sided TWISTER format disks. (The accelerator is also in the /AUTO folder, before the RAMdisk.) Your results may vary. 2) One of two bugs which were fixed in 2.16 may have bitten you. When there are large enough files imbedded in folders to exactly fill the RAMdisk in less than 15 files (without overfilling it), the imbedded folder in which they reside is split across multiple floppies, it is the first folder on the current disk, and it is more than two levels of imbedded folders deep, TURTLE had a wrong total of free space in the RAMdisk (got all that?). When the root directory is filled, but there is space for another file in the RAMdisk, TURTLE tried to write the file. Both these bugs were fixed in 2.16. If I haven't given you a clue to your problem, contact me directly and we'll see what may be happening. You may have found the elusive last bug.... -- *George R. Woodside - Citicorp/TTI - Santa Monica, CA *Path: ..!{trwrb|philabs|csun|psivax}!ttidca!woodside