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From: nakata@Jessica.stanford.edu (Lance Nakata)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: I just thrashed my Hard Disk!
Message-ID: <3028@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 28 Jun 88 07:10:19 GMT
References: <3599@okstate.UUCP> <76000235@uiucdcsp>
Sender: news@Portia.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: nakata@Jessica.stanford.edu (Lance Nakata)
Organization: IRIS, Stanford University
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In article <76000235@uiucdcsp> gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>"Furthermore, Apple's 'Disk First Aid' program seems to be technically
>weak.  It has *never* recovered a bad floppy disk for me (out of about
>5).
>
>Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
>1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      PHONE: 217-244-0432
>ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,ihnp4,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies

In my experience using Disk First Aid, I've found that it works best on a
sector copy of a damaged disk (too bad there's no way to sector copy a hard
disk).  Candidates for DFA are those disks that come up "damaged",
"unreadable", or "not a Macintosh disk" when inserted into a drive.  When
you see one of these messages, it's time to bring out your favorite sector
copier and duplicate the disk.  Don't use bit copy mode; it's too good and
just transfer errors.

MacZap Recover HFS 5.0 (now Symantec Utilities for Macintosh) is the next
best bet if DFA fails.  However, when DFA works, it works *well*.

Lance Nakata
Instruction and Research Information Services
Stanford University
nakata@jessica.stanford.edu