Re: 2 Disk questions...

[dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <42at1s$7qr@PEAK.ORG>,
Even the losers get lucky <daye@PEAK.ORG> wrote:
> First, and most important:
> 
> I made some backups of one of my source code directories a while back.  
> Very recently, the partition with those directories crashed.  No 
> problemo, I thought, I'll just restore the backups.  *choke*.  One of the 
> disks has bad blocks on it all the sudden.  Archiver gags and refuses to 
> restore anything (the backups is just one big shrinkit archive.)  Can I 
> somehow zap the bad blocks so archiver doesn't choke?

Not easily.  I'd recommend taking a copy of the disk with a sector
copy utility that will at least write valid sectors in place of the
damaged ones.  As long as you haven't lost any index blocks in the
files, you might be able to recover something using the "Unshrink"
program (also known as "Auto Unshrink"), which has a facility for
recovering some parts of damaged ShrinkIt archives.

> Second: 
> 
> I have several 5.25" disks that boot with the message "Not a startup 
> disk" which definitely *are* startup disks.

The only case I can think of where this message might be generated is
if you initialized the disk using Copy II+, which writes a dummy boot
sector that clears the screen and says something like "This is not
startup disk.  Insert another disk and press space bar to reboot."

Is this the message you are getting, or is it something else?

What operating system is supposed to be on the disk?  If it is a DOS
3.3 disk, it is unlikely that you will be able to make it bootable
without reinitailizing it, as tracks 1 and 2 are required for the
operating system, and they might have been used by files.  You might
be able to use the "COPY DOS" function in Copy II+ to copy a DOS image
onto the disk.

For a ProDOS volume, I'd be very surprised if you got this message, as
Copy II+ should have written a valid ProDOS boot sector when
initializing the disk.


-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand