Consider a system where free space is kept in a free-space list.
a. Suppose that the pointer to the free-space list is lost. Can the system reconstruct the free-space list? Explain your answer.
b. Consider a file system similar to the one used by UNIX with indexed allocation. How many disk I/O operations might be required to read the contents of a small local file at /a/b/c? Assume that none of the disk blocks is currently being cached.