From:	"J. Hormuzdiar" <jimh AT pantheon DOT yale DOT edu>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Rhide crashes hard drive
Date:	Tue, 25 Mar 1997 01:04:35 -0500
Organization:	Yale University
Lines:	80
Message-ID:	<Pine.GSO.3.94.970325002212.16698A-100000@minerva.cis.yale.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	minerva.cis.yale.edu
Mime-Version:	1.0
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Hello-
	Rhide/DJGPP is a great combination, but I have been having a
horrible time with something lately....

	Rhide has been crashing my hard drive, jumbling directories,
deleting files.  It has happened four times to me now.  I have everything
backed up on zip disks so it is not a catastrophe, but it is quite a
nuscance.  Every time it happens, I have to reformat the whole drive and
re-install everything.... and I usually lose at least a couple hours of
work.

	The details are as follows....  Everything will be intact on my
hard drive, then I move to my project directory and type "Rhide".  Unlike
the other 90%+ of the time when everything comes up fine, Rhide will come
up with the blank introductory screen that indicates no project is there. 
At this point I have always just exited Rhide immediately and type "dir". 
All times the directory is completely scrambled.... files are lost, new
files are added (often with the same names as files I have on the root
directory).  And the damage isn't confined to the directory I am working
on.... everywhere on the hard drive are random scrambles, even whole
directories.  Usually about 10% of the hard drive is "chomped" up.  One
time it wasn't even confined to my e: drive (where I do my programming
work, and where Rhide is located), but also spread to my c: drive.
Running scandisk renders the hard drive once again usable, but can not
save most of the files that are last.

	My system is as follows-

	1). 486DX-33 Silicon Star Motherboard (AKA "Abit"), 8Megs of ram

	2). 2 WD hard drives- one 350Meg, one 1.6Gig, and 1 1.44 floppy
drive.

	3). Promise IDE controller (which includes an addition to the bios
that allows me to access the whole 1.6Gig hard drive.... my motherboard's
4 year old bios was too limited to do this).

	5). AWE value edition sound card

	6). Teac 6x cdrom

	7). US Robotics 33.6 baud modem with fax and voice mail.

	8). Ethernet card plugged in but not being used.

	9). extra Hercules monochrome card and monitor.

	10). Trident VGA card.

	11). Iomega zip drive connected through parallel port (but this
was never connected nor was the software present when the problems
occurred).

	Of all this hardware, I am most suspicious that the promise card
is part of the problem, as it is an unusual device that deals with hard
drive organization.... plus I have to run a special driver to get it to
work.

	I know that the problem is not due to a corrupt "Rhide" file, as I
have re-downloaded it and the problem occurred again.... I am also
relatively certain that it is not due to a virus, as I ran anti-virus
software and found nothing (although I must admit that my virus software
is not up to date).  The problem seems specific to Rhide in that I have
never had this problem running any other software, although in the last
month Rhide has done it four times.  And I doubt that it is because of
DJGPP, because in all cases when the problem occurred, all I did was start
Rhide and stop it (there was no compilation or running of software).

	Furthermore, the problem only started with a version of Rhide 1.1
(one of the intermediary versions only available on R. Hoehne's web page).
Earlier versions never had this problem.

	Has anyone else had this problem?  Does anyone have clues on how I
can solve it?

						Thank you
							-Jim

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