Re: Calling Customer Service for bad sectors

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Tue, 22 Nov 88 09:26:13 CST
    From: forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

    Well, sure Symbolics machines are more complicated than PC's.  

Well, the FEP file system probably isn't much more complex than the
MS-DOS file system.

								   But
    even dumb PC's have clever tools that let people fix things up without
    knowing much at all about the internals.  Surely with the power of the
    Symbolics environment one could write something at least as powerful
    and user friendly as the Norton Utilities?  I understand Unix being
    needlessly obscure, I'm less happy about it in a lispm environment.

In the PC world, the majority of such utilities are written by users and
passed around for free or as shareware.  A few of them eventually grow
up unto commercial products.  But in general they DON'T come from the
vendor.

Given the sources that Symbolics makes available, it would probably not
be too hard for a competent Symbolics system programmer to develop these
kinds of tools (as I mentioned, I've done some direct disk manipulation
manually in the debugger -- LMFS:DESCRIBE-DEFSTORAGE is your friend).
Symbolics probably has some internal documentation on the layout of the
FEPFS and LMFS, which would make it even easier; I wonder if they would
be interested in making such things available to third parties
interested in developing such utilities (no, I'm not volunteering!).

                                                barmar