Is PACK on the HP-71 buggy?

[rprosperi]

(07-14-2014 11:11 PM)Joe Horn Wrote:  QUESTIONS: Is this a known and harmless artifact of PACK and PACKDIR, or is it a bug? If it's a known bug, is there a reliable workaround?

I have read quite recently somewhere? (likely an old forum post, but possibly elsewhere), while researching using the 9114 with the 71B that the PACK and PACKDIR commands are known to have consistent problems with the 9114A, less consistent but still occaisional problems with the 9114B, and ultimately that the author believed the real problem was in the 71 and basically suggested to avoid using these commands; a better solution is to create new media copies if the original media is that discombobulated. The prior disk data that you observed cached in the 71 could be indicative of the problem alluded to here.
(Any chance that old directory data is cached in ILPer?)

That said, when I initially got my PIL-Box, I created lots of LIF files, copied files, deleted them, added, recopied, etc. to learn the devivce's behavior and also tried PACK and PACKDIR and saw no ill effects.

I would not call my testing exhaustive by any means, but after these PACK commands, all files were still intact, from a CATalog viewpoint; I did not actually load and test each file to be sure.

Probably the worst case scenario is packing a volume whose directory has only 1 or 2 open slots. The bogus entries might conceivably get written past the end of the directory table and into the file data area?

Curious - how did you discover this?