16 Mar
1999
16 Mar
'99
5:43 p.m.
Max Eskin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Derek Peschel wrote:
>*starting over again*, seemingly at random. The
defragmentation program
>would be happily scanning C: and then it would put up a notice ("I need to
>start again") and then redo everything it had done until then. This could
>happen a couple of times in a row.
The reason for this is disk accesses. If you moved the
mouse, and it tried
to swap in some tooltip code, that would restart the utility. After
screwing up my system quite severely several times with Norton Utilities,
Defrag, etc. I've resolved never to fiddle with Windows again. The thing
is, I once stopped Defrag, by clicking the stop button, saying yes, etc.
It must have forgotten to flush the buffer, since half the hard drive's
contents vanished.
I suspected you would say something like that. Cameron said something
similar. That only makes me more willing to do what I was going to do
before -- blame the OS. Why is it swapping in so much code? Or, can't the
disk utilities do something to take control of the OS while they're fiddling
with the low-level disk bits?
I'll admit that I haven't seen an OS that allows you to do things AND safely
tweak the disks. Maybe one of the logging file systems? My point is that I
wouldn't be surprised to find that it's a difficult problem to solve.
...of course, MS always seems to solve these things especially badly...
-- Derek