Conference hydra::amiga_v1

    Re .0:
    
    I've had this happen a bunch of times.  It seems that if you move a
    drawer's icon JUST A LITTLE or if you push it outside the margin of the
    window where it resides, it vanishes!  In most cases, I've found it
    hiding (intact) in one of the other subordinate directories.
    
    Obviously, there's a bug here.  It's a REAL nuisance, but is eminently
    avoidable and usually recoverable.

    Hummm. I've had similar things happen when doing the exact same
    thing (mostly with personally created drawer icons) -- but the problem
    has always been that the "item" got accidently placed into a drawer.
    I finally decided that placing enough space between them was better
    after all.
    
    If they aren't hiding in a drawer (or the trashcan) I don't know
    where they would be. Try the FindFile program to track them down
    (on a Fish disk or part of the Cramden utilities).

    
    Ditto here!
    
    This hasn't happend to me in a long time but I used to loose
    directories very often and don't know why it stopped happening.
    The good new is that I never "lost" the data, it's simply misplaced.
    I generally use one of the PD find utilities to look for it.
    
    I often wonder why the disappearing files syndrome went away. Since I
    can't reliably reproduce it, I don't know for sure it won't occur again
    but I can't ever recall seeing it since I upgraded to Amiga DOS 1.3.2
    
    Frank
    

    
    re .0
    
    Ed,
    
    Are you experiencing this on a 500 or 2000?  Reason I ask is that 
    a long time ago I recall Roy (at the memory location) telling me this
    seemed to be happening on A2000 only.
    
    Frank
    

     It's on an expanded 500 system.
     I'm still waiting to populate my memory.. so I'm running it on about a
    bare 750k free.... Could this be causing problems?
    
    							Ed
    

    It happens on my 3meg 2000, but only in certain windows or with
    certain drawers. Since I "learned" how far to space things, I don't
    encounter it very much anymore. I don't think it has to do with
    memory, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if it had something
    to do with window positioning or with which tool was used to create
    the icon (or merge it).

    This is a pretty common problem when manipulating drawers in Workbench. 
    The missing drawer is usually found in one of the drawers adjacent to
    the one you were manipulating or, if you were using multi-selection,
    the next drawer selected after the missing one.  This is from memory so
    the specifics may be suspect.  I do not use the workbench often. 
    Usually when I want to manipulate many files and directories at one
    setting I use SID v1.06.
    

    True, it is common.  But your case is special because you can't
    find your files.  The AmigaDOS specification indicates that dirs
    are not circular, but guess what!!!  You got it, you can infact
    have a case of circular drawers.  Since this is coming from CA we
    might say they are "fruity" drawers.  If you were to place them
    on a loom, perhaps they would be fruit of the loom drawers, but
    we're not covering that!  You may want to use DISKSALV or DISKED
    to look at the structure and see if you have droped a drawer into
    a child and lost the drawer in a circular path.  There is one other
    bug in 1.3 that is rare too besides the "drawer-in-drawer" problem
    and this is one in which the icons just disappear.  Re-booting usually
    solves the problem (I don't know what causes it).  If you can't
    find the drawer in another drawer and rebooting doesn't find them
    either, then check for the fruit of the loom drawers.
    
    TOPGUN

    r: .8
    
    I have experienced the missing drawer syndrome on my 2000 running WB
    1.3. Its happened ten or twelve times in the last couple of weeks.
    I just added a 2091 and quantum hard drive and have been patitioning
    and creating icons etc... all over the place.
    Some times it seemed that they had not come back on reboot but on
    scrolling the window I usually found it off screen somewhere. If not
    a second boot would always bring it back.
    It only seems to happen if you are moving icons around and performing
    snapshots or creating new drawers/renaming them.
    Does this get fixed in 1.3.2?
    
    Regards,
    
    Ron

    1.3.2 has the same problem.  It has happened to me many times on my 500
    and 2000.  But I tend to keep my drawers tight together.  I use ARP but 
    can't you do a DIR #? ALL or something along that line to see if it got 
    dropped into another directory.
    
    Alan                 
    

     Well, on going over my hard disk with a disk editor, I looked for my
    files using the search function.
     I found a couple of them, but the program bombed out during the search
    with a disk error!
     I then realized that my worst fear had come true....
     The other night I used B.A.D. to try to optomize my drive..
     Since it's an 80 meg, I figured it take a few hours, so I started it
    before I went to bed.
     I turned off the monitor and put a couple of empty disks in the drive
    to make it as un-annoying as possible and went to sleep.
     When I awoke, my system had been turned off.
     Yes, my wife was afraid to let it run all night (not haveing any faith
    in my wireing of the hard-drive case) and didn't want to hear the fan
    on the power supply.
      I thought perhaps I'd been lucky, and she hadn't corrupted anything.
      I guess I was wrong.
      Maybe when I re-wrote the draws they were rewritten to a bad sector?
      At any rate, I tried using disksalve on it, but that kept bombing out
    as well.
    
    	Looks like I'll be spending a couple of days re-loading software on
    the re-formatted hard-drive.
    
    							Thanks,
    								Ed
    

    Re .11:
    
    Not to preach, but this should provide several object lessons (a power
    failure would have had the same effect as an over-cautious spouse and
    probably even WORSE timing) for hard-disk users, in general.
    
    1.	Get (and USE regularly) a decent backup program.  I've been quite
    	pleased with QUARTERBACK.  Rebuilding a disk is NO FUN, even if you
    	have all the data stored elsewhere from which to do it.
    
    2.	Always ASSUME your first attempt to reorganize your hard disk will
    	end in failure.  Know just what your recovery plan will be when it
    	does.  (Pessimists are seldom disappointed. 8^)
    
    3.	If you're worried about leaving your monitor on and having some
    	image permanently etched thereon, use a blanking program.  I use
    	ClockDJ, which allows me to specify the inactivity periods for both
    	cursor and screen blanking.  It also allows display of the time and
    	available memory in a one-line window that you can place wherever
    	you choose.  (Gurus often follow exhaustion of Chip RAM, so knowing
    	how one stands at any given moment is VERY HELPFUL!)

    Having received B.A.D. with my Amiga500 I used it successfully on my
    FLOPPIES.  I've been running several hard drives on my amiga for over 7
    months without any problems that weren't caused by myself.  Having some
    idle time and, unfortunately, rediscovering B.A.D. I thought that maybe
    I could squeeze a bit more speed out of these slow (222k Read/s) ST-506
    drives.  I "blitzed" one of my hard drive partitions to optimize it for
    the CLI and went to bed.  Next morning I see a system requestor stating
    that EH4: (the blitzed parttion) has a r/w error.  No problem, I'll
    just hit cancel and map out the bad spot.  Welll, my system hung and to
    make a long story short, I had to re-map and reformat my hard drive.
    I verified that it will consistently trash MY hard drive partitions
    by using it on a spare drive I had laying around.  It lived up to
    expectations.  B.A.D. is bad(and that ain't good)  ;^)
    I promptly flung BAD(which is aptly named when used on hard drives)
    into the lake behind my house.  I retreived it later.(eco-consciousness
    - and didn't want it polluting anything else).  BAD is great for
    floppies IMHO but is grief if used on hard drives.

    I've used B.A.D. on my 30 meg partitions (both through Janus and
    AmigaDos handlers) and have never had a problem -- it worked as
    claimed.

    Are there any other Hard-Drive Optimizers besides B.A.D?
    I realize there are different file systems, but I must admit, the speed
    of optimization using a utility such as Norton's on an IBM is pretty
    impressive, compared to the tools available for hard-disk maint on the 
    Amiga.
    							   Ed
    (P.S. I friend of mine has "disk mechanic", but he says it will only
    work with the slow file system.)
    

    I've also always used B.A.D. and I'm very happy with it.  
    
    Steve
    

    
    Another choice in on the way.  Central Coast Software is about to
    release a package called Quarterback Tools.  This is a hard disk
    utility pkg that does bad spot mapping, defragmentation, undeleting
    files you accidentally deleted, plus some other goodies.  This software
    is done by George Chamberlain who wrote Quarterback.  It's supposed to
    be available either this week or next.  
    
    Frank
    

    I've read postings from those who swear by B.A.D. and those who will
    not use it, like me.  Whatever works for you.  Central Coast Software,
    the folks who market Quarterback, has a "disk optimizer" included in
    a package called Quarterback tools.  
    
    md

    I've got an undelete if you really need it ...
    
    
    I believe it came off a Fred Fish Disk..
    
    
    		-Pete-
    
    Do you have any figures regarding the defrag of disks ??

    I've been looking for an easy-to-use undelete that works on hard
    disks -- does the one you mentioned apply?
    

     I've gotten Quarterback, boy it's fast!
     I'm pretty impressed, I think I'll get the Quarterback Tools when it
    comes out...
    
    						Ed
    

    
    I believe the undelete I mentioned is for Floppys only but am not sure
    because I can't find the readme..
    
    	I've uploaded it to Tape::user2:[upload]undel.lzh
    
    			- Pete -