farrell-robert@YALE.ARPA.UUCP (02/16/87)
Well, it finally happened. I trashed a valuable disk without a backup copy!
I was copying, switching disks in and out quickly, decided a really needed a ramdisk
for the job, shut the ATARI off and booted with the disk that had HARRIS's ramdisk
on it. When it finally booted, it didn't execute my AUTO folder. The icons were
there but the names were trashed and when I tried to open the trashed folders,
the disk searched but didn't find anything and I got a "disk damaged" alarm box.
Does anyone know how to salvage something from this disk? I can get access to SECED,
TTOOL, and JOSHUA from friends in my user's group, but haven't used any of these
programs. My life, or at least my livelihood is on the line here.
-- Rob
-------braner@AMVAX.TN.CORNELL.EDU.UUCP (02/17/87)
Hi! I sure hope your livelihood doesn't depend on a disk... I don't quite understand your description of the problem: Is the damaged disk one of those invloved in the copying? I.e., did you mix up the source and destination disks, being in a hurry? If using "thin.prg" doesn't help, then it's not easy. To use a disk editor you'll need to learn some details of the way information is organized on a disk. (It is very much like MS-DOS disks, for which there is lots of documentation. The FAT, though, is 5 sectors long, and the root directory 7 sectors.) It sounds like the root directory is damaged. I suggest you make a backup- copy of the damaged disk, then search the disk for sectors that look like subdirectories. When you find one, copy it to logical sector 11 (the start of the root directory) and fill sector 12 with zeros. You should be able to read some files off the disk. Files that were in the root directory (rather than folders) will not be found this way, though... Good luck! - Moshe Braner