possible head crash :-(

[Gary S. Trujillo]

Thanks to John Milton, John MacMillan, Judy Scheltema, and everyone else
who wrote or posted to express sympathy and/or to make suggestions on how
to solve my disk problem.  My problem was solved last week, due mainly to
the patience and perserverance of John MacMillan, who worked with me and
provided guidance and encouragement.

John's theory as to what actually happened is that the disk was in the
process of doing a write operation when it was jarred, and that the heads
were momentarily far enough out of position to cause a too-weak signal to
be laid down in one particular block.  His recommended solution was a
procedure to copy a block of zeroes over the faulty block.  I did so,
ran fsck, and "Hey, presto!" I was able to salvage what was left, with
very little loss (within an hour, after restoring a handful of lost files
from backups, I was back up in multi-user mode - good as new!).

John Milton gets some credit here too, for his posting from back in April
or so where he describes a way to fix up /etc/inittab (which he forgot to
mention by name :-) to boot from the hard disk in single-user mode.  Thanks
also to whoever it was (Lenny T.?) who first suggested how to create a
boot floppy from the distribution disks that permit one to mount /dev/fp002
in order to do fixup work on it.

As my pennance (in addition to the many lashes with wet noodles I have
administered to myself for being so stooopid as to THWACKK the keyboard
into place), I have agreed with John MacMillan to go over the notes he
sent me to put them into the form of a tutorial describing what I have
learned from the experience, so some of you might be spared my grief.

Again, thanks to all, and watch this space for the posting from John and me.

	Gary

-- 
Gary S. Trujillo                              gst at gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts                     {wjh12,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst