Recovering lost clusters quickly

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4 total messages Started by Mark Rogers Thu, 23 Mar 1995 09:13

#631

Author: Mark Rogers
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 1995 09:13

28 lines
2194 bytes

I'm looking for some software which can quickly fix lost clusters - 
preferably unattended. I have Norton Utilities, and obviously DOS's 
CHKDSK, but both are slow, which I assume is down to them checking more 
than I actually want them to check.

It's quite possible that all the extra file integrity checks are 
necessary to ensure that the lost clusters are recovered correctly, in 
which case I'll have to accept the solutions I already have. But I'm not 
convinced that this is the case.

[The reason I need this is that I am writing interrupt driven software 
in BP7's IDE; not surprisingly, during development this is prone to 
crashing. When it does so, it leaves a 2MB swap file on disk, which about 
50% of the time appears on rebooting as a zero length file, with the 
actual swap data as lost clusters. At 2MB a time it quickly eats up disk 
space, and when you are crashing/rebooting very frquently the time taken 
by reclaiming the lost clusters gets annoying. Of-course it would 
probably be better to get some more memory so that the IDE didn't need 
the swap file, but that is going to have to wait :(]

<Cross-posted to comp.archives.announce.d and my service provider's 
local group demon.tech.pc>

Mark.
-- 
int MeaningOfLife (void) { return 42; }   // mcr@holly.demon.co.uk
function MeaningOfLife :integer; begin MeaningOfLife := 6 * 9 end;

Re: Recovering lost clusters quickly

#632

Author: John Beardmore
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 1995 23:04

18 lines
1623 bytes

In article <795975235snx@holly.demon.co.uk>
           mcr@holly.demon.co.uk "Mark Rogers" writes:

>I'm looking for some software which can quickly fix lost clusters - 
>preferably unattended. I have Norton Utilities, and obviously DOS's 
>CHKDSK, but both are slow, which I assume is down to them checking more 
>than I actually want them to check.

Look at scandisk. It has switches for unattended use. Chkdsk can prompt the
user even with /f set.

Scandisk may be no slower so long as you don't do a media scan.

-- 
John Beardmore     wookie@wookie.demon.co.uk
                   wookie@cix.compulink.co.uk

Remember children:  'M' is for Monoculture, Monopoly and for Microsoft.

Re: Recovering lost clusters quickly

#633

Author: Jean-Francois Vaillancourt
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 21:50

28 lines
2072 bytes

mcr@holly.demon.co.uk (Mark Rogers) writes:

>I'm looking for some software which can quickly fix lost clusters -
>preferably unattended. I have Norton Utilities, and obviously DOS's
>CHKDSK, but both are slow, which I assume is down to them checking more
>than I actually want them to check.

>It's quite possible that all the extra file integrity checks are
>necessary to ensure that the lost clusters are recovered correctly, in
>which case I'll have to accept the solutions I already have. But I'm not
>convinced that this is the case.

I'm afraid Norton is pretty fast (for what it does) compared to PCTools,
and there is no shareware/freeware utility that does as good a job, that
I'm aware of.

You can run only Norton Disk Doctor with the /Q switch, and set the options
to autorepair all. It will then be non-interactive and quite fast. Fast
enough that I can use it routinely on bootup for several machines here.

Jean-Francois
--
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Re: Recovering lost clusters quickly

#634

Author: Fuzzy Fox
Date: Sat, 01 Apr 1995 00:00

18 lines
1357 bytes

mcr@holly.demon.co.uk (Mark Rogers) writes:

> It's quite possible that all the extra file integrity checks are
> necessary to ensure that the lost clusters are recovered correctly, in
> which case I'll have to accept the solutions I already have.  But I'm
> not convinced that this is the case.

The checks are necessary.  The only way to tell if a cluster is "lost"
is to see if any file on the disk has claimed it.

I have found that CHKDSK is the fastest of any of the disk integrity
checkers, at least on my 386.  "ECHO N | CHKDSK/F" should do what you
want.

-- 
----- Fuzzy Fox ----- fox@netcom.com ----- http://mikey.convex.com:8080/ -----
  "You can visualize a hundred cats.  Beyond that, you can't.  Two hundred,
   five hundred, it all looks the same." -- Jack Wright, owner of 689 cats

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