[moggy]

Alright, yesterday, everything bugged out on my G3 running Jaguar. iChat wouldn't load. Safari would crash when I go to apple.com. The finder was awfully slow. And in Photoshop the only thing I could use were the menu items, that's it.

So I popped in my Norton CD, found 20 major errors (le sigh!), and it fixed all but one (le pant!). The one was NODE 9484, record 95. "Incorrect extent starting block number." It wouldn't fix but when I booted back into OS X, I now have a Lost and Found folder with a folder inside that that is called "1" and a file inside that that is called "_____________" and the file says it is 51.5gigs. I have 30 gigs on my computer (2 HDs).

The computer is running much much better, but should I be alarmed at all with this?

I checked Norton documentation and it says:
"If no hardlink files to your original file (the inode file) exist, you can't access your original file in Mac OS_X. This situation can arise if you accidentally delete hardlink files while your computer is started in Mac OS 9.x, or if there is directory corruption. Norton Disk Doctor repairs this by creating a new hardlink file for the inode. The new hardlink file is placed in the Lost and Found folder created by Norton Disk Doctor."

Am I alright, or should I consider a replacement HD (since that petty drive is only 12 gigs anyway).

Thanks!

[rjenkinson]

something in the file system got corrupted. it's not a hardware problem so you shouldn't bother buying a new hard drive.

-r.

[Millennium]

To explain the deal with hardlinks:

Hardlinks don't fit in well with a spatial metaphor, like aliases do. The reason for this is that while aliases are merely pointers to a file, hardlinks actually put the file in multiple places at once. Don't try visualizing it; I can't do it either, because in a spatial metaphor that breaks so many laws of physics that it's not even funny. One of my old college roommates put it best: "Euclidean space has been violated!" Or would that be Togazzinian space, in this instance?

It is, however, kind of neat, because it allows for some big advantages over even aliases. For one, it isn't normally possible to have an "orphaned hardlink" (that is, a hardlink which points to a file that has been deleted), because the hardlink is the original, just as much as the file which you'd originally hardlinked it to. As long as one hardlink to a file continues to exist, the file will continue to exist, even if the "original" is deleted. The file is only deleted when the last hardlink is gone.

There are some big disadvantages to hardlinks too, however. You can't hardlink a file on one disk onto another disk, for example. Worse, you can't make hardlinks to directories, because that would just completely screw up the filesystem hierarchy. Actually, root can make hardlinks to directories, but that's not advisable.

Ahem. Anyways, on to hardlinks and HFS+. HFS+ doesn't actually support hardlinks in the traditional Unix sense. OSX uses a number of interesting tricks to emulate hardlinks, and they work well enough, most of the time. But there are times when thost tricks fall apart, and OS9 is one of those times.