NA, NAQP, and Faulty Hard Drives

[AC1O at delphi.com]

To elaborate (per many requests) on why my NA logging program crashed after
the NAQP: it looks like my hard drive was the culprit.  We'll never know for 
sure, but our (K3LR + me + assorted computer gurus) best guess is this:
 
My bad NA files were cross-linked to both some WordPerfect files and some
incoming e-mail files.  The e-mail files had been downloaded while I was on 
the road and later erased.  At least one of those files failed to download 
properly; I got 37 messages, but the file stopped abruptly in the middle of 
message #30.  Apparently whatever caused that left something (a bad "EOF" 
character?) on my hard drive, and when NA went to write on that sector it 
couldn't.  (That's why I ended up with two AUGNAQP.QDF files; the "EOF" 
character caused the program to terminate the file at that point.)  The 
CHKDSK/F command has now restored my hard disk to normal, although I'm going
to run the new Norton Utilities to make sure that it was something written on 
the hard drive that caused the problem, not the hard drive itself.
 
Morals of the story: 1) Run CHKDSK regularly on your laptop's hard drive -- 
especially after trips and/or downloading e-mail through a strange gateway; 
stuff MAY end up on the hard drive that you'll wish hadn't.  2) K3LR is a 
good guy to have on your side.  He contacted me immediately after my initial
posting Sunday, and bent over backwards working with me on the problem (he 
was on the phone with me almost an hour today alone) -- and he kept on 
working with me even after all concerned determined that my hard drive, 
not the NA program, was almost certainly the cause of the problem.  In this 
day and age, an attitude like LTA's is refreshing indeed. 
 
73 de Walt, AC1O/4     "ac1o at delphi.com"
   
 

>From Howard.Hoyt at psybbs.durham.nc.us (Howard Hoyt)  Wed Aug 10 12:48:02 1994
From: Howard.Hoyt at psybbs.durham.nc.us (Howard Hoyt) (Howard Hoyt)
Date: 10 Aug 94 06:48:02 -0500
Subject: unsubscribe
Message-ID: <288_9408100655 at psybbs.durham.nc.us>


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