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From: ajq@mace.cc.purdue.edu (John O'Malley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: MacZap's about as useful as a crashed hard disk
Message-ID: <107@mace.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 3 Jun 88 03:27:21 GMT
Reply-To: ajq@mace.cc.purdue.edu (John O'Malley)
Organization: Personal Computing Learning Resource Center, Purdue University
Lines: 33


Just a few days ago, I was asked to recommend a disk fixer utility package.
Not having experience with them myself and vaguely remembering I'd heard
good things about MacZap, I mentioned it.  

Well, he ordered it from MacConnection (receiving, as is usual, absolutely
excellent service from them) for $39.  I borrowed the disk and manual to
try it out on both a bad floppy and a hard disk (had the floppy a while,
hard disk coincidentally crashed today).

It's looking like my recommendation was a >>BIG<< MISTAKE.  The documentation
is absolutely horrid, and the MacZap utilities are not only incredibly 
un-user friendly, but they actually bomb right and left!  After at least 3 
hours of coercing the software, I had absolutely no success with the floppy 
and I was only able to salvage ONE file (a MacWrite file) off the hard disk.  
And I seriously think that the software saved that one file for me by accident!
This is not the kind of behavior I'd expect from a product labeled 
"version 5.0"!

I've given up.  The hard disk backups are four days old, so I won't lose 
too many files.  Now I wish that MacConnection had a money-back guarantee,
so that I could recommend returning the entire MacZap package ... :-(

The whole problem with the hard disk started, by the way, when a Lightspeed-C
program crashed the system.  Finder (booted from floppy) now wants to 
initialize the whole "damaged" hard disk.  Any suggestions?  Tell me quick, 
'cause the hard disk's about to be re-initialized!


Mac SE HD20 (crashed)/Sys 4.2/Find 6.0/MacZap Recover HFS & Recover 5.0
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John O'Malley         \ Personal Computing       \ Purdue University \ (317)
mace.cc.purdue.edu!ajq \ Learning Resource Center \ Computing Center  \ 494-9944