kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) (10/07/89)
I have a Jasmine Direct Drive 80, about 2 years old, that has been flawless up to now. I'm still hopeful, but it got its first "hit" today, and there was suddenly a file that could not be used. It was an Excel file, but Excel barfed on it. The finder wouldn't copy it. Nothing would work with it. To give the punchline first, after all my effort, I don't know how to tell if my disk is okay or not. This is a strange and worrisome position to be in. I'm hoping someone can tell me how, or what tools I need. I'm used to hardware trouble, having been involved as a programmer, sometimes of disk driver software, since 1962 with more kinds of systems and problems than I can hope to remember. I just don't ever remember having so little information and so few tools to help me figure out what exactly is wrong, and what solutions are plausible. So you can get technical with me, if you like. Just don't expect me to have the SCSI spec or whatever memorized, or even avialable to me. I have restored the offending file from a backup that was not too far out of date, but don't know how to asses the situation on the disk. I have a number of promising pieces of software, some of which have resurrected busted floppies for me in the past, so I thought this would be easy. Wrong!! Disk First Aid: just reported that it was unable to verify the disk, with no information about why or where the trouble might be. After restoring the bad file, it now can verify the disk. However, this runs so fast that it's obviously not reading all of the data recorded on the disk, let alone the unrecorded areas. Maybe it reads the directory entries; that would be about right at 50 seconds on a half-full drive. MacTools 7.2 (from Copy II Mac) was no help at all. It will only verify floppy disks, and gave no real information about the bad sectors of the file while it was still around. It identified the error as 127 (or maybe -127). And like the others, gives no information about where that sector "really" is. Snoopy (I had it on a BMUG disk somewhere: never paid the shareware fee, but never thought of it as something that I "used", and I won't do it now either) did give me the amusing information "Deep shit internal error" which may be its interpretation of 127. I preferred the original 127, because if I thought it would do any good, I would be able to look it up. Somehow, I don't expect to see that text message in Inside Macintosh. --- Now that I have the disk back to where Disk First Aid likes it, I would like to know if there are "bad spots" out there in need of fixing. I have no idea how to tell, and that's where I would like some help. I want something that will read ALL unmarked sectors, and tell me if there are errors. Does any such thing exist? The Jasmine manual has this fairly cryptic thing to say: "[these drives] ... automatically find and lock out bad sectors during normal useage". Does anyone know if that means the bad sectors I saw will no longer be in the maps? Should I backup and reformat? Is that all I can do to scan the disk? Looking for a guru.