Prosel, take me away!

[mcafee@umich.edu (Sean McAfee)]

I was programming yesterday, innocently plugging along, when suddenly my
machine froze.  I rebooted from my hard drive, and got the message "UNABLE
TO LOAD PRODOS".  Uh oh.  Booting from a 3.5" system disk, I found that
most of the files in the root directory of the main partition of the hard
drive were gone, and the ones that were left had garbled names ("Wywtem" for
"System", for example).  However, the space left on the drive seemed to be
about what it should have been, so it looked like the rest of the files
were there, just not showing up in the directory.

So, I booted up Prosel-16.  The "Repair Main Directory Structure" command
worked, although it only restored some of the missing files and
subdirectories.  The "Test/Fix Directory Structure" commands, however,
behaved peculiarly.  Within a second after executing them, they complained
that block $02 (the main directory block, apparently) was already in use, and
stopped.  They did the same thing even after I shut down the machine
completely and rebooted.

Is there a way around this, or am I basically screwed?

Btw, here's what I was doing before the machine froze.  I had finally figured
out a major bug in my up-and-coming comm program, and was doing things on my
university account with it.  It crashed, and I assumed it was because the
internal modem input buffer was being overflowed (at present there is no
checking to ensure this does not happen).  I changed a single #define to
double the input buffer size, recompiled, and ran the program again.  Then,
the big-time crash.

Any speculation as to what could have caused this crash would also be most
welcome.  The type of crash (garbled directory structure and file names on
the hard drive) is similar to a problem I was having earlier this year.
The general consensus was that I had a corrupt memory chip somewhere.  I
sent it back to the manufacturer, who told me that he could find nothing
wrong, but would install some noise-protection hardware, and returned it to
me (after six weeks, grumble grumble).  The memory card has been working fine
ever since.

--
Sean McAfee      |  "I wanted to look my best for you, so this morning I put
mcafee@umich.edu |   on my tiger briefs and did a sit-up."  --Jay Sherman