Re: Perplexing GS hardware problem

[jp1@aol.com]

pschultz@med.wayne.edu  [Paul Schultz] writes

>>I've used Deliverance for years without any trouble. Besides, this
>>is but one of many problems I'm having...sigh...I wish it were as
>>simple as a buggy Deliverance! :-)

Actually, Deliverance is/was admirably _un_-buggy, taking into account all
that it was designed to do.  [But make no mistake, there were some bugs. 
The most frustrating of them was that an "error buffer" would sometimes
fill and overflow if too many errors were encountered.  Chris Warner never
got the chance to track it down and fix it before he and Vitesse
acknowledged "irreconcilable differences."]

Deliverance is _much_ more willing to tackle nasty disk/directory errors,
with the burden of sometimes getting into situations that conflict with
GS/OS. itself...and thus crash loudly.  ProSel, on the other hand, always
appeared to me to be designed to avoid such situations, more often than
not backing away with a message to the effect that the situation was too
grim to tackle.  (As a user, I always preferred Deliverance's approach,
because if I had a problem that I needed fixed, I wanted the util to try
as hard as it could, not just concur and say, "Yep.  You've sure got a
problem, chump."  So, being part of the design team, I leaned heavily on
Chris to 'go for it.')

Paul, since Deliv can't fix the "key block in use" problem, have you
considered trying to fix it manually?  One of Deliv's nice features is the
"user-friendly" dialog provided for key data.  As well, since Deliv has
the ability to make changes/fixes _completely_ in memory, you can try
manual fixes, re-run the Vol Repair routine, and see if you've been
successful...and only when you got the situation to be (more) tolerable
would you neeed/want to make the changes permanent.

To go a little further, if you're going to venture into manual repair,
you'd do well to make all changes 'temporary' (in RAM), then use Deliv's
built-in file copy routine to copy whatever files you're able to resurrect
to another volume that doesn't have a directory structure problem.  [Sure
wish that Chris had not been forced to sever relations with Vitesse before
he added the feature of being able to 'mark' blocks for 'assembly' into a
file and saving to disk.]

John P.  (was there in the 'good old days')