[12095] in Athena Bugs
decmips 7.6G: mtools, disk drives
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jason M. Sachs)
Mon May 30 13:43:48 1994
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 30 May 94 13:43:40 EDT
From: Jason M. Sachs <nosaj@MIT.EDU>
System name: sofa
Type and version: KN02ca 7.6G (1 update(s) to same version)
Display type: PMAG-DV
What were you trying to do?
use the disk drives + mtools to copy some files onto a floppy
What's wrong:
I've reported this before, that i've had problems, however it
now seems that there is something really wrong with either
the hardware or the software.
I'm home in NJ with a disk that I brought home. The disk
had no hardware problems that I was aware of; then I copied
some stuff on it with mtools just before i left, and now the
disk has *physical errors* on it. Norton disk doctor is unable
to read anything useful from it.
Something similar has happened to other floppy disks before
(they seem to suffer gradual degredation when I write onto
them from an athena workstation), but it never really did so
consistently, and i wasn't sure whether my disks had errors
on it beforehand or whether they were getting screwed up from
sitting in my backpack and being exposed to dirt ove the course
of time.
However, this disk I got from a friend, and it was completely filled
with information and worked fine on her DOS machine (she said i could
get rid of the stuff on it and have the disk), and after that one
session of copying stuff onto it from an athena machine, (and bringing
the disk home in a plastic bag on the train... somehow i doubt that
the disk was corrupted during my journey home) it now has evil physical
problems that render the disk unreadable and useless for any further
purposes. (I can't format it.)
Whether it is just the disk drives on athena machines (I've never used
the Sun disk drives; it's always been from rs6000s or decstations or
the vaxes in the course 6 cluster, and I log in on so many different
machines that this problem does not seem confined to one machine)
or mtools (maybe mwrite causes the drives to do something evil to my
floppies), this is EXTREMELY UNACCEPTIBLE behavior. I'm glad
I didn't have anything important on those floppies.
What should have happened:
I would like a reliable way to transfer files between my athena account
and a floppy disk. If athena drives don't measure up to par, then I
just won't use them anymore. However, the only other option for me is
to use either dialup or internet access to transfer files; dialup
is slow if i'm going to be transferring say, 1 megabyte, and internet
access is hard to find. (DCNS has some PC's on the network and i've
been able to use ftp to transfer files this way before, though e40
is somewhat out of the way.)
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
i dunno. search me.
