HEACOCK@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Doug Heacock) (12/18/89)
Part of my job is to try to recover files from trashed disks for users of our Mac lab, and for other Mac users around the campus. Over the last year or so, I have probably seen an average of 3-5 bad disks per week. Using Symantec Utilities for the Macintosh, I am usually able to recover most of the files from a damaged disk--until recently, that is. Until the last couple of months, most of the disks I saw were disks that generated the "This disk is damaged" or "This disk is unreadable" messages. With SUM, these are relatively easy to deal with. But more recently I have been gettings disks that mount fine, but contain files that generate "Serious disk error" messages when read with MS-Word (mostly) or MacWrite or WordPerfect. Some of the time I can recover the damaged file with SUM (sometimes not), and when I can, it almost always has some damage (scrambled text) somewhere. The increase in these types of problems has coincided roughly with two events: (1) upgrade from Word 3 to Word 4 in our Mac lab, and (2) upgrade from Mac SE's to Mac IIcx's in our Mac lab. I have an SE on my desk, and I've been using Word 4 for several months, on a daily basis, and I've never encountered one of the disk errors of the type our lab users are suffering. So what I'm wondering is this: What is the deal with all these Mac disk problems?!? Are the new "super- floppy" drives causing problems? Is MS-Word the problem? Has anyone else been hassled by these kinds of problems? For the record, our lab (which is where most of the problems originate, but not all of them) consists of 14 Mac IIcx systems with 2 MB and 40MB disks, connected via LocalTalk to a Mac IIcx running AppleShare. We are running System 6.0.3, and we check for viruses regularly. Also, the hard disks are restored regularly (I'm not sure what the interval is). The lab is used almost exclusively for word processing, and most of that is with Word 4 (some MacWrite 5 and some WordPerfect 1.whatever). Any help you can offer is appreciated. You can reply directly via mail, and I will gladly summarize to the net. -- +===========================================+============================+ | Doug Heacock, Academic Computing Services | heacock@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu | | The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS | heacock@ukanvax.bitnet | +===========================================+============================+