Athanasios Kotsenos wrote:
> when some phd student's file had gone corrupt (microsoft access i think it
> was) she went into the dos prompt and did scandisk and all this other
> totally irrelevant stuff when after i realised that she hadn't a clue i
> spoke up and said that either the file is totally trashed (and it's your
> problem you didn't keep backups) or the information is still there and you
> may be able to salvage some of it or all of it if you open it up in notepad
> which she did and it worked
> but she couldn't handle the fact that she had to do so much cut and paste
> still i think it would be better than retyping the whole thing in, don't u
> agree? - it was a 10M file btw
Back in my days as a Radio Shack Computer Center tech support guy,
a customer came in with a crashed SuperScripsit file. (For any of
you who remember, Model III SuperScripsit had the most fragile file
format ever known to that point (though since exceeded by most of
the Microsoft Word formats) -- if the first couple of sectors in a
file were hosed, there went all of it. I did a sector-by-sector
salvage of ASCII text into a CR-delimited file, but I never knew
how well the salvage went, as the text was in Latin, a language I
can only follow with extensive dictionary help. The customer took
it back to his secretary and I never saw him again, though my
previous salvages of his (English) files had been fairly frequent.
(I take that back -- I've seen him a few times since on television
since he shows up now and again in New Age and UFO documentaries --
Los Angeles can be a wonderful place that I miss intensely).
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram_at_cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
WARNING: The Attorney General has determined that Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms can be hazardous to your health -- and get away with it.
Received on Mon Oct 26 1998 - 09:22:17 GMT