🚀 go-pugleaf

ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer) writes:

>Over the weekend I suddenly (well over the period of a few mins) lost
>3.5Meg of my hard disc free space. I was archiving some files and what
>appeared to happen is that every time a new file was placed in the
>archive (producing a copy of the archive temporarily) the old one at
>the end was NOT being added to the free space map (or is it taken
>away?) on my IDE (A5000) hard disc.

I suspect that you are the victim of map rot.  It can happen that when doing
lots of writing/deleting, RiscOS fails to link now unused areas of disc onto
the free list, resulting in a number of phantom objects in the map, rotting
away the free space.  Owen tells me that RO 3.1 is the least prone to map
rot, by the way.  It's also the only version on which I've actually observed
the problem, but never mind.

>[...]

>Now my question is, is there some easy way of getting that 3.5 meg
>back without having to re-initialise my hard disc and reinstal all the
>data?

Yes.  However, if you don't know exactly what you're doing then
reinitialising and reinstalling will be faster and more likely to leave you
with a functioning disc.

Cheers,
         a lurgified Rhodri

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