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From: scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Hans Was Right - Sort Of
Message-ID: <300@l5comp.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 20-Jul-87 17:18:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5comp.300
Posted: Mon Jul 20 17:18:53 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Jul-87 06:31:41 EDT
References: <3569@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner)
Organization: L5 Computing, Edmonds, WA
Lines: 49
Summary: That's a real Ooops Perry!

In article <3569@well.UUCP> perry@well.UUCP (Perry S. Kivolowitz) writes:
>Anyway, I  resorted to punching a hole through one of the little fellers
>and lo! It didn't format anymore. Gee.
>
>I started up FaccII and  saw that  the bashed sectors were in fact being
>verified  from disk  and  were being rejected as misformatted. So format
>retried. And the retry came from the cache. Ooops. Sorry.
Ooops sorry? Perry, if I understand what you just said then what is going on
here has NOTHING to do with formatting disks.

Rather it sounds like what you are saying is that even though trackdisk.device
said the data read was bad you cached it anyway!

So rather than the problem being that you were caching format data, you were
instead caching data from reads that trackdisk.device said was defective?

>Four assembly language instructions  later I can now promise that FaccII
>formats correctly. 
But what happens if a disk takes a hit and a file is damaged? Will emacs read
the file and report nothing is amiss because facc cached it for the retry?

>Have no fear of your formatted floppies however, the  bug only manifests
>itself if there have been RETRY's. If your floppy formatted cleanly then
>it is a perfectly formatted floppy.
Uh, you mean that so long as my disk had no defects on it in the first place
then it isn't defective? But that if it had defects then format didn't catch
them and I may be using disks that I THINK are perfect and yet are NOT?

Shouldn't that paragraph read:

You may want to check any floppies that were formatted with FACC enabled since
the bug I fixed may have caused format to report defective disks as being
non-defective.

PLUS issue:

Also, please be aware that if you have FACC enabled and encounter a bad block
on the disk the above bug may mask this and make the block appear good. You
should upgrade your FACC ASAP. [or only use Sony diskettes]

Or am I wrong? Gee I wish I had a FACC so I could feed it a blank disk and see
if FACC makes it appear as formatted but blank when I tried to read it! :-)
Hmm, might be worth buying a FACC just to try that...

Scott Turner
-- 
UUCP-stick: stride!l5comp!scotty | If you want to injure my goldfish just make
UUCP-auto: scotty@l5comp.UUCP    | sure I don't run up a vet bill.
GEnie: JST			 | "The bombs drop in 5 minutes" R. Reagan
		Disclaimer? I own L5 Computing. Isn't that enough?