From rusmv1!Sirius.dfn.de!darwin.sura.net!europa.asd.contel.com!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!sunic!ugle.unit.no!solan1.solan.unit.no!okloster Wed Jan 15 11:11:10 MET 1992
Article: 3825 of comp.sys.acorn
Path: rusmv1!Sirius.dfn.de!darwin.sura.net!europa.asd.contel.com!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!sunic!ugle.unit.no!solan1.solan.unit.no!okloster
From: okloster@solan.unit.no (Oddvar Kloster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Broken Directory what now ?
Message-ID: <1992Jan14.163738.27199@ugle.unit.no>
Date: 14 Jan 92 16:37:38 GMT
References: <1992Jan13.150822.12142@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
Sender: news@ugle.unit.no (NetNews Administrator)
Reply-To: okloster@solan.unit.no (Oddvar Kloster)
Organization: Norwegian Institute of Technology
Lines: 32

A 'broken directory' message means that the directory in question has been
corrupted.  Every time the file system tries to access the contents of the
directory, it finds an error in the directory format and returns the error.
Therefore you can't open it, and you can't delete it, because the machine
wants to be sure that it is empty before deleting it.  

I had this problem with my hard disc about a year ago, when for some unknown
reason, 2 meg of it got written over by what looked like a complete memory dump. 
It seems strange that you should get this problem if you only used the standard
functions for accessing files etc.

How to fix it:
Do a *EX to find out the physical disc address of the directory. Load it into
memory using Adfs_DiscOp and take a look at it (directories are usually 2048
bytes long.)  If it doesn't look too corrupted, you may try to correct it.
There should be a name like 'hugo' or 'fred' in the first word, and then some
filenames and addresses, and if there are not too many files, the dir should
be symmetrical, that is, the files listed in the beginning are also listed
at the end. However, if the data is just gibberish, or you don't want to
fiddle the bits, then:
Create a new empty directory and find its address. Copy it onto the broken
directory.  Now you will find an empty directory instead of a broken one.
Warning: All files in the broken directory will be gone. If the broken 
directory did contain files over about 500 bytes long, the space they
occupied will not be freed, since the free space map is not updated, so in
effect you will reduce the size of your hard disc.  This is however
probably preferable to having a broken directory.  The only safe way to
reclaim the lost space that I can think of, is to back up the hard disc
and reformat it.  That's what I did. 


Oddvar.

Article 3956 (1 more) in comp.sys.acorn:
From: lorcan@cix.compulink.co.uk (Lorcan Mongey)
Subject: Re: Broken Directory what now ?
Date: 20 Jan 92 01:15:45 GMT
Organization: Gated to News by demon.co.uk
Lines: 37

 a specially-created
 directory on a floppy and a sector editor should reveal where exactly
 these checksums are. It's just possible that altering one to match the
 other might fix it, at least for long enough to copy the recovered files
 to somewhere safe.