24 Aug
2012
24 Aug
'12
2:37 p.m.
One thing that's always bothered me about CP/M and MS-DOS, for that
matter. Why, oh, why when the machine is doing nothing are the disk
drive heads always (or nearly so) positioned over the directory
track?
While a glitch can wipe out a whole track, at least MS-DOS may allow
one to recover the files based on the FAT contents (assuming that it
doesn't share the same track as the directory), losing the directory
track on a CP/M machine is suicide. One has to go and piece together
the files cluster by cluster.
Why not, during idle periods, move the heads one cylinder to a "leave
garbage here" track?
This was always a mystery to me.
--Chuck