Re: ProDOS floppy crashes Mac O/S 7.6.1 running on a Powerbook 520c

["Jayson Smith" <ihatespamratguynospamplease@insightbb.spamsucks.com>]

Hi,

I can think of two possibilities. First, it could be an unused block marked 
as used. Either Mr. Fixit or GSCopy should ask you at some point if you want 
to free such blocks. Since Mr. Fix It couldn't fix it, the other, and more 
disturbing, possibility is that two files are incorrectly sharing that 
block. If this is the case, the data is almost certainly valid for only one 
of those files. On FAT filesystems this is called cross linking, and is one 
of the more dreaded problems, as one file has probably overwritten the other 
file's data without even knowing it. What's worse, there's no way to know 
which file has valid data and which one has incorrect data, so all repair 
programs can possibly do is to give each effected file its own copy of the 
effected areas and hope for the best.
Jayson

"AppleCPM" <a2@wilserv.com> wrote in message 
18cb1426-9431-473d-9359-c2a7c0acd51e@f21g2000vbr.googlegroups.com">news:18cb1426-9431-473d-9359-c2a7c0acd51e@f21g2000vbr.googlegroups.com...
Hi!

On Jun 17, 8:53 pm, Michael wrote:
> I'm not a Mac guy, but doesn't MacOS like to "decorate" any write-enabled
> floppy with a Finder file?
> I'm guessing it died trying to allocate space in a "broken" bitmap or
> directory.

    Exactly!  I ran Glen Bredon's "MR.FIXIT" on the disk.  It reported
"8_<-Block in use".  Neither the 'F' or 'M' options of that program
was able to repair the problem.  The only way to make the disk usable
was to reformat it.

    OK, so what does "Block in use" mean?  Guess it's time to RTFM...

Willi