🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MEISSNER.9...@osf.osf.org> meis...@osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes:
>In article <DAVEG.90S...@near.cs.caltech.edu>
>da...@near.cs.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes:
>
>| How many times have we all warned beginning programmers to cross their
>| t's and dot their i's:  "Store through an uninitialized pointer, and
>| the computer could do anything---it could even run amok and delete all
>| your files!"
>| 
>| Okay, folks:  Have you ever had a bug in an innocent little program
>| that really did delete all your files?  Reformat the hard disk?  Send
>| rude mail to your mother?  (Well, probably not that.)
>
>I posted this about a year ago.....
>
>The first internal revision of the Data General 32-bit AOS/VS PL/1
>compiler had a bug where it would sometimes delete your source file.

   And so did Borland's TASM. The option to turn on symbol-table generation
for the debugger is /zi. One day, I accidentally typed /vi. According to
the manual, the /v option was included "for compatibility" and actually did
nothing.
   Well, what actually happened was that I got a message "I.ASM not found"
and TASM exited. Fine so far... but my source file was mysteriously
missing.
   Borland was able to reproduce the problem and it's fixed in TASM 2.0 --
that was one of the first things I checked when I got it. :)


   Of course, that's only the beginning of the story. I wanted my source
file *back*, after all. I didn't have Norton or anything, but I had a PD
uneraser. So I decided to use that.
   My hard drives were, at that point in time, all partitioned into 10M
chunks (for complicated reasons relating to the presence of an original
Plus 10M Hardcard in the system). A 10M drive normally uses a 12-bit FAT,
but I had hacked them all to use 16-bit FATs (to cut down on cluster
quantization waste). HOWEVER, the uneraser didn't bother to check what size
the FAT was. It assumed a 12-bit FAT and "repaired" it as such, which wrote
a lot of garbage all over the FAT.
   The next stupid thing I did was to run CHKDSK, which noticed that the
FAT was trashed and tried to repair it by truncating directories, files,
etc., thereby wiping out the entire partition.
   At which point I went out and bought Norton (which I should have done to
begin with) and spent two days repairing the disk by hand, since there were
some things on that drive which were unique. I'm much better about making
backups since then... :/

-- 
---
James W. Birdsall        jwbi...@amc.com         71261...@compuserve.com
          Compu$erve: 71261,1731            GEnie: J.BIRDSALL2
For it is the doom of men that they forget. -- Merlin