This is Warning-about-optical-disks-and-0.8-to-0.9-conversion in view mode; [Up]
Date: Sun 15-May-1989 15:50:49 From: Unknown Subject: Warning about optical disks and 0.8 to 0.9 conversion (I'm not 100% sure of this scenario, but this is the way I reconstruct the events. There may be other things involved, but I don't think so.) This last weekend I upgraded from 0.8 to 0.9. In preparation, I bought a blank od, and initialized it with "disk -i -t omd-1-all". I backed up all the files I had changed on my 0.8 hard disk. I then booted 0.9 and hit the hammer. After the hard disk had rebuilt, I rebooted 0.9 off of it. I then inserted my backup optical disk. It automounted under the name "/me/INITIALIZED". I thought "this is a pretty yucky name", so I used the disk program under 0.9 to change it to "backup" (since that's what I plan to use the od for). This apparently changed the disk type from omd-1-all to omd-1. Then I unmounted the od and reinserted it to get it under the new name. Well, in the course of mounting the disk, it decided that the file system was dirty and ran an "fsck -y" (-y!) on it. Unfortunately (and apparently without warning), NeXT has changed the /etc/disktab description for optical disks. In particular (I think this is the culprit, anyway), they changed the number of sectors in a cylinder group. Anyway, the good ol' fsck "fixed" my disk into oblivion. After it got done mounting, the mount point was a file, not a directory. The upshot of all this is that everything I did under 0.8 is gone (not that that's any big deal, but it is very depressing). So be careful when using disks formatted by 0.8 under 0.9. There are some circumstances under which it will eat them.
Date: Sun 15-May-1989 23:31:52 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Warning about optical disks and 0.8 to 0.9 conversion I'd like to echo Roy Mongiovi's comment about being extremely cautious when using 0.8 disks under 0.9. Someone at CMU got hammered in a similar way. ...eric >From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.