The Perils of Peggy
                  (Part 1)
                     by
                  D.FOWLER2

     It was a dark and stormy night ... uh, 
this is a scholarly publication? Sez who?
     I've been messing with computers for six 
years. In that time I've learned that things 
do go wrong from time to time. I must say 
that our Kaypros are extraordinarily 
reliable. We've never had a serious 
electronic or mechanical problem. Oh, I've 
had to vacuum the cat hairs and Oreo crumbs 
out of the keyboard occasionally, and I've 
cleaned the disk drives once or twice, but 
nothing beyond that.
     I can remember only four or five times 
when I have had any disk reading problems.  
Never have the problems arisen because of the 
disk drives, and rarely have they been 
serious. Once my Perfect Calc program 
committed suicide on me. In my foolish youth 
I scrambled a WordStar disk by storing it on 
top of my computer, right over the monitor 
with its nice strong magnetic field. Data- 
wise, Perfect Calc spreadsheets sometimes get 
corrupted when one bit flips from 0 to 1 (or 
vice versa). I fix those with my text 
processor. I had a dBaseII file send a few 
letters into italics on me. Again, one bit 
had switched from 0 to 1. I added a filter 
routine to the command program to get rid of 
that problem. Nothing major.
     Think of how fragile our data is. All 
that information is stored as tiny bits of 
magnetism in a thin coating of "rust" on a 
floppy plastic platter. It's read by a 
delicate bit of electronics as the platter 
spins at 300 RPM a fraction of an inch away.
     Think about it and you get this sudden 
impulse to back up your data Right Away.  
Because something could go Very Seriously 
Wrong. As recently happened to my long 
suffering spouse, Peggy.
     She produces an Alumnae Newsletter for 
her old summer camp. This year it has to get 
out in time to round up everyone for the 
reunion up in New Hampshire in June, so she 
was really hammering on it. All the various 
parts of it, about 45 single spaced pages, 
were on one disk (of course). Well, there she 
was, churning along on the table of contents 
and she went to save her work and right in 
the middle of the save, with no warning, 
Everything went CRASH! "BDOS ERROR ON B: BAD 
SECTOR."
     Naturally, she had been going to back up 
the data onto another disk Real Soon Now.  
She'd been walking the tightrope without a 
net and the rope broke. That's always the way 
it is. I've never heard of a disk crashing 
just after you have backed things up.
     She did not throw a screaming fit. She 
didn't even mutter under her breath. The 
silence was frightening.
     When something like this happens, I get 
called in (though Super Hacker I am not). A 
quick check and I knew we were in trouble.  
WordStar floundered like a wounded albatross 
when asked to do anything with that disk.  
Just asking for a directory of the disk 
produced a spastic grunting from any drive it 
was in. I got the sinking feeling that 
nothing short of an act of God was going to 
read that disk, IF the files were still there 
at all.
     Feeling somewhat akin to St. George, I 
shouldered my nerd pack and ventured into 
chaos. My first reconnaissance was with 
NSweep. After being prodded past its "Read 
Error" message with several <Return>s it 
managed to penetrate the wreckage. It did 
succeed in listing the files, but could do 
nothing with them.
     It was obviously time to bring in the 
heavy wrecking equipment. I reached for my 
rusty old (7.7) version of DU.
     DU is the ultimate Disk Utility. DU is 
to NSweep as a large backhoe is to a shovel.  
It is Mr. Goodwrench's Garage, as opposed to 
the $8.95 26 piece socket set you bought at K 
Mart. It is ... well, you get the idea.
     DU is also to be used VERY CAREFULLY, 
because you can easily dig the hole you are 
in a great deal deeper, and then pull it in 
after you. So, magic wand in hand, cloak of 
invisibility enfolding me, brass lantern 
lighted and held aloft, I tip-toed in, 
constantly on the watch for fearsome Grues.
     DU looks at the designated disk in great 
detail. Once you tell it exactly where to 
look, by track and sector, you can ask it to 
show you what is there with the (D)ump 
command. It will display (in hexadecimal 
code) every byte in a sector, and (if it is a 
text file) a "translation" of it into the 
ASCII.
     The first thing DU did when I invoked it 
and asked it to look at Track 1, Sector 1, 
was make the drive holding the ravaged disk 
make a lot of noise, (but good noise, as I'll 
explain later). It then informed me, and I 
quote: ++ READ failed, sector may be invalid 
++. Then it displayed what it had found.
     My worst fears were confirmed. What 
should have been the directory of the files 
on the disk was trash. Some file names were 
legible, but not all. Worse, on the line 
below some of the names, where there were 
supposed to be file addresses it was 
Chernobyl.
     You know, of course, that the directory 
track is not there just so when you give your 
computer the DIRectory command it can tell 
you what you've got. It is there so the 
computer can find the files in the first 
place. Trash your directory track (or, for 
you IBMers, your File Allocation Table (FAT)) 
and those files might just as well be on the 
moon, or on an anchovy pizza, take your pick.
     Baaaadum! Baaaaadum! Baadum, 
baadumbaadumbaadum.
     Had Jaws eaten Peggy's newsletter? Will 
our Fearless Hero be able to plumb the turgid 
depths and retrieve the Golden Treasure?  
Will faithful Nurse Stella discover that Dr.  
Jameson is dallying with the mysterious 
amnesia patient in Room 214, who (unknown to 
Stella) is really her half-sister by her step- 
father who is Dr. Jameson's evil and 
licentious long lost great-uncle? Tune in 
next month.

              (To be continued)