Re: [MiNT] Weird Disk problem

[Petr Stehlik <joy@sophics.cz>]

Adam Kłobukowski píše v So 08. 01. 2005 v 20:18 +0100:
>  From time to time few first sectors of my HDD get zeroed, for no known 
> reason.
> 
> Fortunetly I do not keep valuable information on my C partition, and I 
> do backups of it often, so recovery is just a matter of minutes.
> 
> If anybody does have any reasonable explanation of this, please rise 
> your hand and step forward.

Nothing reasonable, just some thoughts. I have often heard in Atari
realm that it's good to partition disk to contain a small C: with just
boot stuff and then D: (and possibly more partitions) for valuable data
since sometimes the C: partition is lost. Don't remember the reason but
I do remember this used to be suggested...

Also, I do remember that TOS 4.01 had a bug in its GEMDOS and when a
partition was almost full (or was it just the FAT table full?) it simply
started writing from the beginning. A GEMDOS bug would not rewrite boot
record and partition table, though.

I think I heard about a similar but slightly less dangerous bug in TOS
4.04, I might even have a test program that proves the GEMDOS problem
somewhere.

So maybe that the problem in 4.01 was not a GEMDOS bug but something
deeper, more dangerous.

At last, your disk driver might be doing some nasty things. Which one do
you use?

Petr