From: Alice L. Givan (Alice.L.Givan@Dartmouth.EDU)
Date: Wed Jun 09 1993 - 13:59:48 EST
Hello (especially to John Meeker, Ron Mikaels, Dave Jackson, Fred Hillario, Carolyn Dawson, Joe Trotter, Dave Gebhard, Neal Benson, Dave Coder, Ivan Shaw, and Richard Alexander -- all of whom responded with suggestions to my cry for help). As you probably will not recall, our problem had been with a user's corrupted 20 Mb Bernoulli cartridge (for the BD Lysys II system) -- that was coming up with an unreadable block message when scanned with hfs check and was listing that the disk was full but that ZERO files were present. We were not able to access any of the data and were looking for a way to recover the files. To make a long story somewhat shorter, one name kept coming up in many of your suggestions: Richard A. Cox Flow Cytometry Support PO Box 3450, Saratoga, CA 95070-1450 (phone=408-370-6327; Internet=2359766@mcimail.com) We sent him our Bernoulli; he found two bad spots on the cartridge (in the area of the directory), but was able to recover all our data and copy it over on to a good cartridge. The charge was $100. We recommend him. In addition, he suggested that we not use the hfs format for our bernoullis -- but convert them to LIF format. LIF format does not utilize sub-directories but stores all files in one long series. This means that you cannot structure your data storage, but there is, evidently, improved disk performance because of less I/O activity (and, in addition, this frees about 3Mbytes more storage space on the cartridge). Unofficial advice from BD confirms that this is a workable option. If you want to know how to format your Bernoulli cartridges to LIF file structure, ask Richard Cox (who may have to start charging for this advice if all those unhappy Bernoulli users start contacting him). By the way, have any BD users started using optical disks? In our facility we have gone back to recommending 3-1/2 inch floppies -- they are cheaper (by byte) than the 20Mbyte bernoullis, they make data organization easier as long as you have a big disk box, and you certainly don't lose as much data if a disk fails..... Again, thanks for all your help. If you need any further information and can benefit from our mistakes, let me know. Alice Givan Alice.L.Givan@dartmouth.edu NCCC Flow Cytometry Laboratory/Department of Physiology Dartmouth Medical School Lebanon, New Hampshire 03756-0001 USA voice 603-650-7907 fax 603-650-6130
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