🚀 go-pugleaf

I've run into a disk-related problem which has some interesting
characteristics. While copying the contents of a subdirectory, I paled as I
watched the drive stutter and the dreaded "General Failure" message appear.
I isolated the problem to one file, which happened to be a modified hershey
font file that I've been playing with for some time. Investigation revealed:

    1. "type" and "copy" both produced the "General Failure" message. Retries
       didn't help but ignoring the error allowed the whole file to be read
       with some extraneous fluff at the end.
    2. PC Magazine's "diskscan" program reported 1 error when reading a 128
       sector group that included the file. However, when reading each sector
       in the group individually, no error was reported/discovered.
    3. The file could still be read completely and correctly by a Basic program
       I've been using (my copy of MSC V4.0 hasn't arrived yet :-).
    4. Microsoft Word V3.0 could read the file without difficulty.
    5. "recover" prints a "X out of X bytes recovered" message but no solution.
    6. Changing "BUFFERS=20" to "BUFFERS=10" in my CONFIG.SYS file made the
       *whole problem* go away! "type" and "copy" work quietly and "diskscan"
       doesn't report any errors. The only residual effect is that the end of
       file mark seems to have been zorched appending some extraneous data.

The machine is a PC running 3.1 with a 20meg Seagate on a short WD
controller. It has 640k (about 600k available) and the usual assortment
of cards and things.  The only real change recently has been the
installation of V5.02 of the Microsoft bus mouse driver that came with
Word 3.0.

So, do I have a bad disk or is it a DOS problem? Or both? Or neither?
-- 


Regards,

George Hart, Computer X Canada Ltd.
UUCP: {allegra|decvax|duke|floyd|linus|ihnp4}!utzoo!mnetor!george
BELL: (416)475-8980