[11977] in Athena Bugs
decmips 7.6G: mtools (and floppy drives in general)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jason M. Sachs)
Sun Apr 24 19:05:36 1994
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 94 19:05:32 EDT
From: Jason M. Sachs <nosaj@MIT.EDU>
System name: m11-113-13
Type and version: KN02ca 7.6G
Display type: PMAG-DV
What were you trying to do?
Copy my email to a dos disk
What's wrong:
mtools does not handle sector errors on floppy disks gracefully.
I have had horrible problems writing stuff to floppy disks from
both RS6000's and decstations (I'm not going to bother trying
sparcstations) when I have no trouble at all using either
my DOS machine or the DOS machine I use at work. It's a 3 1/2"
high-density disk.
What should have happened:
You should at least be able to *read the directory* of
a disk.
~/mailbox% mdir
disk_read: read: I/O error
This was a disk that mdir had no trouble at all reading
about 5 minutes ago, before I wrote anything to the disk.
Now it just refuses to print anything useful at all.
I mean, I should at least get partial information,
and the sheer common-ness of this kind of thing happening
is really pissing me off. Last year I lost data on a floppy because
it got munged by an RS6000. I don't understand why this happens
so often with Athena workstations.
