EUG PD


ADFS E00

Author: Richard Dimond
Publisher: ACP/Pres
Machine: Acorn Electron

 
Published in EUG #24

I recently reviewed the ACP/Pres ADFS E00 disk and mentioned it can get corrupted in the Advanced Battery Backed RAM (ABR) as apparently the ABR cannot be locked when this is loaded into it.

If it gets badly corrupted, it can cause the ADFS to fail to operate and it is then necessary to remove it and re-load it. However, I have found that is can seem to be all right and yet sometimes give false error reports. This seems to be due to a slight corruption as re-loading it corrects this. Some of these may be of little importance but, on two occasions, I have found that I could have had more serious trouble.

First, the disk fault given was "Disc fault 48 at 0:000002" and the disk would not *MOUNT. This usually necessitates the disk being re-formatted but I thought I had not written to the disk and fortunately checked it without the ABR and found it to be all right. After re-loading the Adfs E00, the disk then *MOUNTed correctly.

I was transferring some programs later on using HeadFirst PD's utility AACopy when after two had been transferred, the rest were skipped; the program repeatedly asking for the target directory. On checking the disk, I got the above report, even when the ABR was removed, so the disk had to be re-formatted. I tried again with the same result. After re-formatting again, I tried without the ABR and transferred without trouble. So I re-loaded the ABR and found that cured the problem. Luckily, I had been transferring to a new disk. The corruption could have been more serious if the disk had already had programs saved on it.

In spite of these occasional mishaps, I find the ADFS E00 very useful and I have it in my Electron's ABR all the time.

Richard Dimond