I hope someone that wishes to speculate on their own re: this lost cluster
business will read further and comment.
First, I had a major piece of good luck. Because I had recently de-fragged
and compacted my drive, most of my files occupied contiguous sectors.
By browsing the .CHK files, I was able to easily locate .zips, and one of
them was my zipped compilation of changes to Arachne 1.62.
Upon renaming and unzipping, I found that it was intact !! <G>
But here we have part of the puzzle. The allocation chain was obviously
intact. It was a simple chain, sure, but the file had the right length -
as did all my .zbms. Short files had lengths of one cluster minimum.
Please argue with me here, but I think that means the FATs were intact.
They were certainly in agreement with each other or I would have gotten
an error message.
To me, it seems the only way this can happen is if the directory was
overwritten, but the FAT was not updated. This COULD mean that there
was NO command issued to write the dirs, the disk just wrote data in
the wrong physical place !
Sounds like a good excuse for subdirs to NOT be files. <g>
Further, I have identified and taken care of all the 103 .CHK files except
one. It is a LINUX file and has no business being on my "C" partition.
Also, I just checked and found nine lost clusters on my "D" partition which
contains my UMSDOS Linux distros. EVERY ONE had an ARACHNE reference in it !
I ran my Linuxii and they were all ok !
All lost clusters with the "--LINUX--" marker have been saved for further
autopsy.
Here we again have evidence of damage reaching outside the range of the local
partition. This fits in with possible write activity unaligned with the proper
sector.
Finally, and this is PURE speculation right now, circumstantial evidence
points to a possible involvement with Ncache !
I had just recently (about 1-2 months ago) switched from PC-Cache to Ncache.
AND, LD is famous for lost clusters, and used Ncache in the past.
How about it, LD ? Any lost clusters recently ?
- Clarence Verge
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