bluebum@westfort.UUCP (Barry Chern) (03/11/89)
Has anyone ever heard of a desktop becoming fatally fragmented? I recently saw
a couple of floppies die right before my eyes in a way that led me to consider this
as a possible cause. I was working on cleaning up my archive of PD type
downloads, copying things from disk to disk and deleting them from their
original location. Right before the moment of doom I noticed an extreme
slowness in the response of an icon as I would try to drag it, even for a
fraction of an inch in the same window. I would simply be trying to rearrange
things cosmetically, and the sucker would just sit there for what seemed like
an eternity (could have been a whole second) before following the mouse. I
remember thinking "maybe I need to rebuild this desktop." But the next time I
inserted the disk it was unreadable.
I've seen a lot of disks mysteriouly expire between uses, but this was the
first time I've actually seen peculiar behaviour right before it occurred.
Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Take my picture,
Hang it up in Jackson's wall;
Anybody ask you 'what about it',
Just tell 'em 'that's all; that's all.'
-- Charley Patton bluebum@westfort.UUCP
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------aberg@math.rutgers.edu (Hans Aberg) (03/27/89)
Your floppie probably got corrupted through wear; the drive recognizing this would do a couple of retries. The next time your floppie is inserted, the directory, formerly in RAM, is lost. Hans Aberg, Mathematics aberg@math.rutgers.edu
wab@reed.UUCP (Bill Baker) (03/29/89)
In article <2128@westfort.UUCP> westfort!bluebum@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu writes: >Has anyone ever heard of a desktop becoming fatally fragmented? I recently saw >a couple of floppies die right before my eyes in a way that led me to consider this [...] > I've seen a lot of disks mysteriouly expire between uses, but this was the >first time I've actually seen peculiar behaviour right before it occurred. >Anyone else have any thoughts on this? I had a couple of disks die this way in such a way that I don't think it could have been a case of disk failure through wear. I was working with a disk and trash-ejected it so that it was gone from the desktop. When I reinserted it less than a minute later I got the disk unreadable message. Then I reinserted the disk I had inserted after the first and got the same message. The first disk was fairly old but the second was not, besides which two disks failing in close succession would be a big coincidence. I rebooted and no more disks were munged. When I checked the disks with Fedit the desktop sector on both disks was totally blown away (Fedit couldn't read the sector). I haven't had the problem again, but then I've avoided using some suspect applications that I used right before the disks died. Now, I haven't heard of any virus with these symptoms so I had assumed I was just the victim of extraordinarly bad luck, but are other people experiencing desktop deaths? Obviously, the way most disks are corrupted is through the desktop dying so isolated cases are no proof, but has anyone else been losing disks serially? ------------ Bill Baker {backbone}!tektronix!reed!wab
newman@ut-emx.UUCP (Dave Newman) (03/30/89)
I had my SE tell me that about 10 disks were bad late
one night after rearranging my PD software collection.
I had been using the drive a lot for several hours when
the failures happened. I gave up and went to bed, and
the following morning, everything worked fine. I had
the drive checked, and the local service people said it
was bad. The same problem happened again after the
drive was replaced. I now suspect a temperature - related
failure.
>>Dave
P.S. All this disks were fine the following morning but
one which apparently has a bad sector.