read past dud blocks (on hard disc)?

  • Thread starter J. P. Gilliver (John)
  • Start date
G

Gene E. Bloch

he was eventually struck off by the BMA in 1968 for not knowing his gluteus
maximus from his humerus.

Isn't the British spelling of that last word "humeurus"?
 
W

...winston‫

Bill said:
Wonder why they made that change. Maybe it decreases the chance for file
corruption problems since each "record" is in its own file. But then again,
you may have several thousand separate eml files to keep track of, but
perhaps it's worth the tradeoff for potential recovery purposes.

But I think most database programs typically use one master (and index) file
to store a collection of records, which is more like what OE does with its
dbx files.
Most likely a change in the code to adapt to synchronization even though
Windows Mail (WM) in Vista (not supporting http protocol) employed a
common method to Windows Live Mail (WLM)which was already in development
and testing at Vista RTM. In fact MSn Explorer which initially provided
sync via WebDav (and in use prior to WM in Vista and DeltaSync in WLM
for XP, Vista and upcoming Win7) discontinued OE's corruptible dbx format.

With the release of WLM and the Outlook Hotmail Connector (OLHC) it was
quite obvious that the focus was on the 0.5 Billion Hotmail type
accounts - all capable of WebDAV in OE (until deprecated) then DeltaSync
in WLM and Outlook 03/07/10 via the OLHC (OL has the feature built in) -
i.e. synchronization for email, contacts, calendar local and online.
Not only did it set the stage for how Win8 would go (supporting EAS and
later IMAP but the non-syncable POP3) those 0.5 Billion Hotmail accounts
in conjunction with Messenger proved a gold mine of telemetric data on
sync, file sharing, and what many completely missed or misunderstood -
the most important variable of all - cloud data telemetry on usage,
storage, upload/download file picture sharing use and capacity and
functional synchronization across same account compatible multiple
devices (pc, phone, etc.).

WLM, WM, and even Win8x (most likely 10 too) continue to adopt a message
store index that supports local and sync management for those individual
files (a lot easier to add/delete individual files and update an index
when reading/writing/rewriting/deleting etc. in a local and remote
(cloud) environment.
 
J

J. P. Gilliver (John)

Gene E. Bloch said:
Isn't the British spelling of that last word "humeurus"?
Sorry if this was a funny and I'm just being a fall guy, but:

humour is spelt with the u in British English.

I think humorous is the same in both Englishes.

But humerus, being the Latin for elbow, is just that.

("Humeur" looks like a French spelling of something to me.)
 
J

J. P. Gilliver (John)

=?UTF-8?Q?... said:
In Windows, OE was the last free client by MSFT to store files(mail and
news) in database (dbx format). Outlook, MSFT's flagship Office
product, also stores mail messages in a database file (*.pst).

Yes, but all in one .dbx file (or it might have been one per "folder").
I meant a separate real file for each email - but I'm unaware of
anything (in Windows, at least) that does that.
All free MSFT clients post OE all store each email message in a
separate single file (*.eml) - those clients are Windows Live Mail (all

I didn't know that. (Since they're presumably just plain text files,
they could just be .txt, couldn't they?)
versions), Windows Mail (Vista), Windows Mail (8.0, 8.1, 10TP). All of
these except Win8's client also store news messages as separate files
(*.nws)

(I didn't know that either!) Again, could presumably be .txt files.
Note: TheWin8 client does not provide nntp capability and (for mail)
only supports EAS and IMAP.
Well, we know what MS thinks of usenet.
 
G

Gene E. Bloch

Sorry if this was a funny and I'm just being a fall guy, but:

humour is spelt with the u in British English.

I think humorous is the same in both Englishes.

But humerus, being the Latin for elbow, is just that.

("Humeur" looks like a French spelling of something to me.)

My bad for omitting the smiley.

By assuming a (false) analogy to humor (America) vs humour (Britain), I
invented humer (America) vs humeur (Britain), and thence to humeurus.

The French word humeur (it's feminine) means mood, temper, and a couple
of related things.

Humerus is the same in French, but the e has an acute accent. It is, as
expected, masculine.

I have no idea why humorous lacks the extra u on the East side of the
pond.
 
P

Paul

Bill said:
But are they true text files? (i.e. pure ascii files)
I think they also contain some other info too, like message headers and
attachments, and may be MIME encoded. So they aren't really text files per
se as I see it, even though Notepad may still be able to open them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

"eml

Used by many email clients including Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Outlook
Express, Lotus notes, Windows Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Postbox. The
files are plain text in MIME format, containing the email header as well
as the message contents and attachments in one or more of several formats."

So the person who wrote that article, considers them to be "plain text".

HTH,
Paul
 
P

Paul

Bill said:
Paul wrote:

Yeah, I saw that Paul, but it just added more confusion for me (i.e. with
all the qualifiers added).

It's kinda like saying a book is "plain text" (but with a cover and drawings
and photographs and a binding added into the mix). So to me, that's not
plain text anymore.

The answer is actually pretty complicated, and I didn't want to go into
details, hoping you'd just accept that at some level, the file is "text".

At their root, files contain "only numbers"!

We assign a meaning to the numbers. A space alien likely wouldn't see the
pattern at first. But we do.

Think about that for a moment. The disk drive has a whole bunch of sectors,
holding 512 bytes of data each. With a certain tool, say a disk editor, I
can view the files. The display uses numbers to display the contents. When
viewed in this way, each sector has a boring sameness to it, as each screen
full of data has the same format. Page after page of hex digits. Hex, to
make each byte be a constant two characters wide on the screen.

*Every* file type involves some sort of encoding. We need to interpret the
file, and display it on the screen. Decoding the file makes that happen.

Imagine, for a moment, you've just opened a file with a hes editor.

http://i60.tinypic.com/693pf8.gif

The left pane shows the "just numbers" view of the file. The right pane
shows a tentative "ASCII lookup-table view" of the numbers. Notice how,
if you open a "plain text" file with a hex editor, the right pane is
completely readable text. This means the encoding of the file, uses
ASCII lookup table to carry intelligence. This is what we term a
plain text file. We used such terminology in 1980, because ASCII
was about all that was used for such files.

(A popular encoding, but certainly not the only encoding...)
http://www.manpagez.com/man/7/ascii/

But, it remains, an encoding. And, it's not the only encoding. We've
progressed past plain ASCII. Some "text" files you open, don't have
as recognizable a right hand pane in the hex editor. That's because
they're "wide" sixteen bit text. In a modern setting, the hex editor
really needs to be reworked, to detect all the various possible
UTF-8, ASCII, wide, and the like. Wordpad now recognizes a fair
number of different text encodings, and displays them properly
on the screen for you. My hex editor on the other hand, is stuck
in 1980.

If I grab a copy of the port of the "file type" utility from
gnuwin32, in fact it has a hundred different classifications
for "text files". And these are recognizable encodings that the
"file.exe" command can recognize when it looks at a folder full
of files. I didn't realize there were that many, until I recursively
ran the file.exe command over the Firefox source code tree. I
got at least a hundred different messages, that say the file
was "Text", but with different details. Such as whether the
lines of text ended with <CR> or <LF>.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/file.htm

OK, so we accept that all files are "encodings". Now, we re-read
that EML description in the Wikipedia article. At the first level,
our file uses a "number to ASCII encoding". It allows us to view
the file, and portions of it appear in plain English. We use
English decoding to try to extract meaning. Maybe the message
is actually in Swahili, in which case, we'd have to switch languages
to extract meaning. So I need to know the language encoding,
to read even the message body.

The attachments in the file, need to be "7 bit transparent",
for transport on really old transport systems. Base64 encoding
is used, to allow 8 bit (generic) numbers to be carried
on email systems. If we were sending the message body as
ASCII, it would be "naturally" 7 bit. The upper bit would
always be 0, because a seven bit transport would smash it. The
attachments could be similar to binary, need to carry all eight bits
per byte, from end to end. Maybe Base64 or ASCII85 encoding meet
the requirements. Being MIME, there is also likely to be
a file name associated with the attachment, helping to hint
at how to handle the attachment at a later time.

So the EML file has multiple encodings. Using an ASCII
lookup table, may expose some of the meaning. Using a
Base64 decoder and storing an attachment as "doc.pdf"
prepares us to extract meaning from an attachment.
Perhaps when viewed in Acrobat Reader, the "doc.pdf"
also happens to contain only unadorned text. It's
yet another encoding, with its own percentage of
overheads.

So in a way, the notion of "plain text" is a sham. It
wasn't "plain" and the situation wasn't simple after all.
You have a right to be upset and puzzled. The rough
edges of the situation are showing themselves.

*Everything* is encoded. Some encodings are simple and some
are quite complicated. And some are elegant.

Paul
 
G

Gene E. Bloch

Yeah, I saw that Paul, but it just added more confusion for me (i.e. with
all the qualifiers added).

It's kinda like saying a book is "plain text" (but with a cover and drawings
and photographs and a binding added into the mix). So to me, that's not
plain text anymore.

This is only a tiny bit simplified (partly because I don't know all of
the details):

Plain text merely means that all of the characters are text(ASCII)
characters - which in days of yore meant that each byte's contents had a
value more than 0x1f (31 decimal) and less than 0x7e (127 decimal), plus
a few special characters like tab, newline, return. 0x7e (127 decimal)
is DEL, so it's also not printable.

Plain text also means that you can print the file on a printer as it is,
without reencoding anything. Beyond that, it also means that when you
view it in Notepad you won't see strange characters as well as empty
boxes representing character that can't be represented.

And MIME obeys that rule. It is plain text, good old ASCII characters.
It's just that you (or I) can't interpret those characters without a
scorecard, or at least a translator program.

Open a non-text file such as an exe or jpg in Notepad, and you'll see
the difference - but by all means pick a small one, like an icon (ico)
file, to avoid surprises.

I don't recall in any detail how binary (i.e, data in which all byte
values 0x00 to 0xff are allowed) is encoded, as in MIME and other
methods, but basically you can take a few 8-bit bytes, string them
together into a long bit stream, and divide that into seven-bit pieces,
each of which goes into its own byte, so it's now a seven-bit character.
That description is incomplete, though, since it doesn't account for the
special characters from 0 to 31 (and 127) decimal, and a few other
considerations like that (such as line length and such, for reasonable
display).

Note that seven 8-bit bytes would become eight 7-bit values - but as I
said, that doesn't account for the control codes (0x00-0x1f & 0x7f).
 
J

J. P. Gilliver (John)

In message <[email protected]>, Gene E. Bloch
value more than 0x1f (31 decimal) and less than 0x7e (127 decimal), plus
a few special characters like tab, newline, return. 0x7e (127 decimal)
is DEL, so it's also not printable.
[]
127 is 7F; 7E is 126, which in ASCII is ~.

(-:
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

`Where a calculator on the Eniac is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps
weigh 1.5 tons.' Popular Mechanics, March 1949 (quoted in Computing 1999-12-16)
 
G

Gene E. Bloch

Thanks to you and Gene for the nice and detailed explanations here! Plus I
think I've been stuck in the past, circa 1980, on some of this (you know,
the "good ole days" of "pure ascii, i.e. hex 00-7F, and 8 bits. :)

Hey, 8 bits is still worth a dollar these days :)

Glad you're having fun (or so it seems!).
 
B

B00ze/Empire

What isn't
recommended, is opening the drive in your dusty
living room, with absolutely no advanced preparation.
Even if you take the drive into a cabinet, you should
clean the outside of it a bit first, before opening it
up.

I haven't done it in a long time, but I once opened a 170MB drive - yes,
a looong time ago - and blew compressed air on the platters, as there
was a small piece of plastic or two floating around there giving fake
read errors when they hit the heads. Anyways, this was all done "in my
dusty living room" and I had no issues afterwards :)
 
I

Ian Jackson

B00ze/Empire said:
I haven't done it in a long time, but I once opened a 170MB drive -
yes, a looong time ago - and blew compressed air on the platters, as
there was a small piece of plastic or two floating around there giving
fake read errors when they hit the heads. Anyways, this was all done
"in my dusty living room" and I had no issues afterwards :)
"How to Make a Clean Air Enclosure (for HDD repair etc)"
 
I

Ian Jackson

Gene E. Bloch said:
That was impressive - thanks.
This is another of his videos, and shows him sorting out the internals
of the hard drive, and getting it to work well enough to recover the
data.
Unlike an awful lot of similar 'how to' videos, his speech is
crystal-clear (at least to a British ear!), and his speed of
presentation is just right.
 
P

Paul

Gene said:
That was impressive - thanks.

Yeah, that's the same glove box design they
use for working on Ebola samples.

*******

Rather than putting that cardboard box under negative
pressure, the hepafilter could be providing positive
pressure on the source end. That causes air leakage to
move out of the box, through whatever "gaps" exist
around the "gloves" area. Then you can leave the fan running
while you work.

Paul
 
G

Gene E. Bloch

This is another of his videos, and shows him sorting out the internals
of the hard drive, and getting it to work well enough to recover the
data.
Unlike an awful lot of similar 'how to' videos, his speech is
crystal-clear (at least to a British ear!), and his speed of
presentation is just right.

His speech is also very clear to an American ear, although I can't guess
where in England he is from, since I am not versed in the accents &
dialects of the UK.

So far I only watched the first video, and I think his presentation
there is also very clear. Refreshing, compared to many that I've watched
:)
 
G

Gene E. Bloch

Yeah, that's the same glove box design they
use for working on Ebola samples.

Are they also made up of cardboard and duct tape?
Rather than putting that cardboard box under negative
pressure, the hepafilter could be providing positive
pressure on the source end. That causes air leakage to
move out of the box, through whatever "gaps" exist
around the "gloves" area. Then you can leave the fan running
while you work.

Paul

As long as you are pumping clean air in. But yes, I agree.

Someone on the news or in a magazine article recently spoke of keeping a
biological isolation chamber under negative pressure and called doing
that "counterintuitive". Oh well.
 
K

Ken Blake, MVP

His speech is also very clear to an American ear, although I can't guess
where in England he is from, since I am not versed in the accents &
dialects of the UK.

So far I only watched the first video, and I think his presentation
there is also very clear. Refreshing, compared to many that I've watched
:)


This looks very good to me, too. If I wanted such a thing, I'd follow
his instructions and build what he built. But since I'm all thumbs and
don't want to even try going inside a drive, I won't.
 
G

Gene E. Bloch

This looks very good to me, too. If I wanted such a thing, I'd follow
his instructions and build what he built. But since I'm all thumbs and
don't want to even try going inside a drive, I won't.

Since my post, I watched the second video that Ian pointed to, where
Matt unstick a hard drive by opening it *without* using a clean chamber
and then mechanically unsticking it, with no apparent harm done by the
exposure to room air.

But given what you said, you won't want to do that either.

I might do it, not to fix a drive, but to see the insides for my own
edification. For repair, I'm not that confident either...

BTW the second video is also clear, both in his speech and in his
presentation.

I tracked him down to here,
http://www.instructables.com/member/DIYPerks/

and learned that he is either 22 years old or was 22 in 2012. Pretty
good!

I like smart people...
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top