GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) (03/22/88)
In last month's IRUG newsletter I read about how Suitable Solutions had discovered that DOS could be improperly marking clusters as "bad" when formatting a disk and not reporting trouble when doing i/o from supposedly "good" sectors. There was even a floppy to programs to detect and fix this bug! While I don't want to doubt Suitable Solutions credibility, I also get worried about doing low-level operations with my hard disk. Has DEC admitted there is a problem? Is there really a problem? If so, who is responsible for any damage caused by this bug? DEC? MicroSoft? George P.S. If there's anyone out there who's not a subscriber to IRUG and wants these 2 programs, send me e-mail. If there's enough demand, I'll UUENCODE them and send them to the list. Just use them at your own risk - I don't want to assume any responsibility for this.
jto@santra.UUCP (Jari Tomminen) (03/27/88)
In article <Added.MWFaaey00Ui3E3Dk5j@andrew.cmu.edu> GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) writes: > > In last month's IRUG newsletter I read about how Suitable Solutions >had discovered that DOS could be improperly marking clusters as "bad" >when formatting a disk and not reporting trouble when doing i/o from >supposedly "good" sectors. There was even a floppy to programs >to detect and fix this bug! While I don't want to doubt Suitable >Solutions credibility, I also get worried about doing low-level >operations with my hard disk. Has DEC admitted there is a problem? >Is there really a problem? If so, who is responsible for any damage >caused by this bug? DEC? MicroSoft? Yes, there is a real problem. The formatting program FORMAT.COM in DEC's implementation of MS-DOS is severely brain-damaged. It is unable to detect the bad sectors marked by low-level formatters such as DEC's own WUP x.xx hard disk utility programs. The result is that the bad sector table FORMAT.COM is supposed to write on the disk remains empty even if there were bad sectors on the disk. Not a nice thing at all... The best way to handle the problem (well, at least I think it is) is to use the WUTIL formatting/disk maintenance program by Anthony Camas. It takes care of initializing, formatting and partitioning the disk. It also writes better boot loaders on the disk. Another nice thing is that it isn't restricted to be used only on DEC's own disks (or similar to them) but will work on almost any disk you can plug in your Rainbow. Some disks may require the use of Herbert Hofmann's DSKPREP, though. Of course, you mustn't use FORMAT.COM after these programs in order not to spoil the BST. Both programs are freely distributable and, if you want them, you can obtain them by sending me E-Mail. Best regards, Jari. -- | Jari Tomminen, Computing Centre | BOOT: | | Helsinki Univ. of Technology | What your friends give you because | | {anything}!mcvax!santra!jto | you spend too much time bragging | | jto@santra.hut.FI, jto@fingate.BITNET | about your computer skills. |