Re: Partitioning 730MB HD?

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <3q6vk9$6qi@paris.ics.uci.edu>, Orion Pax <jlee@ics.uci.edu> wrote:
>Mitchell Spector (spector@vax2.concordia.ca) wrote:
>: 	- The HFS.FST has serious bugs that can cause damage

>No, the HFS has no serious bugs or it would never had be released and
>people wouldn't even be aple to use it.  Instead, HFS will act strange
>in extremely large parititon sizes and not guaranteed at those sizes,
>BUT no problems in 32 mb to 200 mb sizes.  Just be aware to not store
>sensitive stuff on HFS mostly because there is no utility to fix it if
>something goes bad.

   We're talking semantics here. A 'serious bug' to Joe means
something that crashes on boootup. A 'serious bug' to Mitch and myself
is something that toasts my disks after a while. Being a critical part
of the system software, there should be _no_ bugs that can corrupt
files and/or disks in a FST.

   I've got a roughly 80MB HFS partition on my drive. Last fall, the
list of allocated blocks seems to have gotten mucked up; writing new
files to disk would corrupt preexisting files. Imho, that's very
serious. I didn't like that at all; I eventually had to borrow another
HD to copy everything to, erase my 80MB partition, and copy everything
back.

   Was this problem caused specifically by the HFS FST? I can't prove
it, no. But, with the other problems that manifest themselves faster
on larger disks, that FST is on the top of my list of suspicious, but
'necessary' software. A data corruption one in every 5000 file acceses
will show up really quickly on a large volume, but show up later on
smaller volumes.

Nathan Mates

-- 
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
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