milne@ics.uci.edu (Alastair Milne) (08/20/90)
I am in rather a nasty spot, and I would appreciate whatever experience anybody can pass on. I have a 5-meg Mac II with a Seagate ST557N (I think) 63 meg hard disc, which recently seems to have suffered a big enough trauma that it won't even admit to the Finder that it exists. Trying to boot from it gives the happy Mac face for a few seconds, with reassuring hard-disc access noises, then there's a pause, the video system resets, and I have the question-disc icon. I'm still desparately hoping to find some software that will fix the bad blocks on the drive, but there is (I hope!) this alternative: I do have a full save of it, less current that I'd like, but at least it's done. It was made with FastBack II a couple of months ago. My problem there is that when I experiment with trying to "restore" the backed-up files to other diskettes (even FastBack won't acknowledge that the hard disc exists right now -- clearly I may have to reformat before I can do the full restore) FastBack II complains it can't find the "history file(s)". True enough, I don't see a separate file on either the first, second, or 61st disc of the backup -- the 61st being, I trust, the last, since it has some space left on it whereas none of the others do. The FastBack II manual is not encouraging about working around missing history files -- it does not, in fact, seem to say anything about it. Is there any light anybody can shed? If I can neither repair the bad blocks on the disc, nor restore from the backup, I could be in real trouble. By the way, does FastBack II ever get confused about what sort of volume it's looking at? From time to time, when I reset the choice of volume for backup from/restore to ,the icons labelling the volume names are mismatched: floppies or ramdisc are marked with a hard disc icon. Anybody know if this is expected. Thanks for any help, Alastair Milne