smedley@mizar.udel.edu (Trevor Smedley) (01/08/91)
Please Note: Although the following problem looks like it was caused by Stuffit, it may not be the case. Before I ran stuffit as described below, I had a bomb because I tried to launch an application requiring the FPU which my machine doesn't have (IIsi). I returned to the finder using ES in MacsBug, and didn't reboot. I suppose this could have caused the problem, but I don't think so. If I get me harsd disk back, I may try to duplicate the problem, but I doubt it -- I don't think I want to have to send the thing in for reparis twice in one week. I've been using Stuffit 1.5.1 for ages to decompress files from the net and elsewhere, and for the first time decided to use it for compressing files. I believe that it is "free" if all you do use decompress, and you have to register to use it for compression. Well, if this had worked I would have registered, but now all I want to do is get my hard disk back! Here's the story: I had compressed a bunch of directories into a single (roughly 3.5meg) archive, and was in the process of segmenting this file onto 5 floppies. While it was doing this it kept asking for me to insert the disk "stuff" which is the name of my hard disk. At this point I suppose I should have rebooted, but I kept going, and through insterting a random selection of the disks I was using, and pressing command-. enough times, I got it to finish. I selected Shutdown, and went for lunch. When I came back, the machine would not boot. If I put in a system floppy and wait long enough, eventually it boots off the floppy, but does not find the hard drive. Disk First Aid does nothing, and if I try to use HDSC Setup, I get "Drive Selection Failed. Unable to read required infomation from the disk." Can anyone guess what is causing this before I bring it in for repairs? How about suggestions on the possibility of recovering the data? I have tried every shareware/freeware thing I could find to remount it. By the way, the drive sounds different than normal. It sounds "slower." It also sounds like it is speeding up and slowing down whenever I run something that tries to mount it. I don't know if this is what is happenning, but that's what it sounds like. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Trevor smedley@udel.edu
gillisp@milton.u.washington.edu (Steven Gillispie) (01/09/91)
Have you tried resetting the boot blocks on your hard disk? There are utilities out there that will do this, though I can't give you any names right now. Damaged boot blocks can cause behavior something like what you describe.
smedley@mizar.udel.edu (Trevor Smedley) (01/09/91)
Thanks for the mail about the problem I was having. Here is the status: I picked up SUM II and it says that I have the following errors: SCSI device descriptor sigs bad No SCSI partition map for volume SCSI mapping is bad It tries to fix them, and claims to have completed the repairs, but the problems are still there. Does anyone know what might cause this or how to fix it? I will be taking it in to the dealer within the next day or two, but I'd like to be able to at least get some files off of it first -- neither Norton Utilities nor SUM II were able to recover any files. By the way, SCSI Tools is able to figure out what type of hard disk it is (Connor CP3040A 40mb). Any help is greatly appreciated. If it makes any difference, the machine is a IIsi/40mb with 5mb of ram. There are a few inits on the hard drive, but it has been running fine with them for the past few months. For a complete description of the problem, see the original posting with this subject in comp.sys.mac.system. Thanks, Trevor smedley@udel.edu