🚀 go-pugleaf

>> the hard drive wouldnt come up and it was treated as an non-mac disk.
>> Was this a freak accident or are there virus programs out there which
>> attack macs?  If so, is there a program that can successfully detect

	This was more than likely a freak accident; it's possible for many 
public-domain, freeware, beta-test, and shareware programs to have bugs  in 
them that cause crashes; when these crashes occur, it's possible that it'll 
happen at such a time when the disk directory or information is in an 
inconsistent state. If this happens, it's very possible that the Finder will 
tell you that the disk is not a Macintosh disk or that it's damaged.

>happened was that the program screwed up your parameter RAM (PRAM) and your
>little ole mac got confused about what to do at startup.  Just run a program

	No, no, no.... The disk being damaged is not going to be apparent here, 
except for a refusal to boot from that disk. When the disk drive is " treated 
as a non-mac disk", it's damaged for sure.

	It's not a virus, it's just something that happens from time to time.

	In this case, your best (and probably only) way to recover the disk is to use 
the Disk First Aid program that comes with your Macintosh; it's on one of the 
Utilities disks. Boot up on another floppy and run Disk First aid; a drive 
selection box will come up. Click on the "Drive" button; you'll see either 
"Disk With Bad Name (SCSI #)" (where # is the SCSI address of your disk), or 
your disk's name, or something garbled (SCSI #). Click on the "Open" button, 
then click "Start." If Disk First Aid can fix your disk, it will do so.

	To protect yourself, it's wise to back up often (I use DiskFit; the choice of 
a backup program is subject to personal preference and is something of a 
religious issue) and to become familiar with a program such as Disk First Aid.

	This is one of the risks of using stuff that comes in over the nets; by and 
large, these programs go through absolutely NO testing and NO quality control 
- you are the beta tester. The good part is that there's some genuinely good 
stuff that is posted....

	--Rich

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Rich Siegel
Confused Undergrad, Carnegie-Mellon University

The opinions stated here do not represent the policies
of Carnegie-Mellon University.

Arpa: rich.siegel@andrew.cmu.edu
UUCP: {decvax,ucbvax,sun}!andrew.cmu.edu!rich.siegel
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