🚀 go-pugleaf

     Having spent 2 hours last night recovering from a thoroughly 
scrambled FAT, I thought it appropriate to hold a small post-mortem.
     The culprit *appears* to have been a shareware program called EDRAW 
(Version 3.2), which I picked up as PCSIG Disk #828 from a local 
university's public bbs.  As near as I can diagnose the phenomenon from 
the rather incredible list of messages I received from CHKDSK, what 
happened was this:
     I had installed Borland's Quattro spreadsheet program.  As far as I 
can tell (by using assorted MACE tools), when Quattro installs, it marks 
various disk sectors as protected, probably in aid of finding its own
overlays.  (MACE had been respecting these and not moving them about 
during unfragmenting operations.)  EDRAW apparently did *not* recognize 
and/or respect this protection.  When I used the program to make some 
sketches and symbols and proceeded to save them to the disk, then, EDRAW 
evidently wrote good parts of them over these protected sectors.  The 
result was the most incredible mess of truncations and crosslinks I've 
ever seen.
     Whether and, if so, how the various memory resident utilities I had 
installed entered into the scenario of destruction, I do not know.
     Responses, reactions, comments, and alternative diagnoses will be 
most welcome.  I've learned a lot from the net over the years.  One
thing I learned:  Keep current backups!  I did.  Go ye, and do likewise!

-- 

JAY ROSENBERG  Dept. of Philosophy  CB# 3125  UNC  Chapel Hill, NC  27599
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