Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: frl9lk on December 14, 2007, 05:54:47 PM
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A4000/40 with OS 3.1
The internal HD is formatted to five 1G partitions. There are also a couple of external HDs. The system has been stable.
I tried an unfamiliar WHDLoad, and somehow that seems to have screwed up the boot partition. I now get the message HD0: Not a DOS Device.
If I boot from floppy, all the other HDs show up. Needless to say, I want too try to re-install that drive/partition without losing everything.
Any help appreciated.
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Does your filesystem and SCSI device support >4GB partitions? If not you probably wrote above 4 GB and it has wrapped around to the beginning of the drive and destroyed the RDB.
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moto
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No single partition was larger than 1G. There are five on one physical drive... and that set-up had been running for months.
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Doesn't matter how the drive is split up. If the filesystem or SCSI device don't know how to address above 4GB it will still wrap around. You were probably just lucky until now.
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moto
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My mistake. When I opened the case I discovered that it is a 4G (Quantum) drive in there after all. The five partitions then must all be more like 800M each... I know I was trying to stay below the gig-per-partition threshold. Sorry for the misinformation.
Anyway, I'm still faced with the same dilemma.
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A drive labelled as 4GB might still be bigger than 4GB. Run Check4GB to check.
I was trying to stay below the gig-per-partition threshold.
There is no such limit.
Bye,
Thomas
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Hi
This may sound extreme... But with the floppy boot can you copy the whole of any partition to another partition. ie the entire content of data from one to another. If so do so and format that partition then copy back. You must not change the partition sizes. Do the same with each without switching the machine off. You may find you cure this.
What I do with larger than 4GB drives is to only format the drive to the 4GB limit and never use the remainder above the 4GB. I do have larger than 4GB running on all my Amigas on OS3 without problem. Sadly I have had drives that play up like this. They get confused. I just copy that partition over to another and format. Losing all of them is very careless :-)
See how you get on... Don`t switch the machine off while you are doing the above though...
I call it my ' silly boot ' process. Dunno why. Rebuilding a harddrive while the machine stays on. A great Amiga trick.
Have you rescanned the drives without saving using the HDToolbox on the floppy disk to see what it says about the drives and their size. Sometimes it kick starts the drive again. Have fun.
PS Your hard drive light works I hope .. You haven`t got a drive trying to validate itself. Can take an age. Probably a checksum on your boot drive. Its that one that I would copy first... Little trick is always to keep a copy of your Workbench on another drive just in case.
Also check your power supply to the hard drive and ribbon. An intermittant power fault on the drive can cause the same problems. I would also start looking for another 4GB drive to be honest and be prepared. You can stick the two piggy back and copy your stuff over... Formatting over the data without copying should really be your last resort. If you can see the stuff with a floppy, then hook up another drive and copy the stuff over. Format under the 4GB limit and reuse...
Whats WHDLoad ? Sorry.
scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com
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You could hook the drive up to your PC, run winUAE and copy your files you need to keep to another drive on the PC, then just wipe the drive, re-partition and then re-load WB then copy your important files back to the drive.
I just had a drive go bad and had to hook up a spare to my PC and basically do just what I described. The drive booted right up when I put it back in my 4000, only thing is after all that the mouse craped out on me.
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Thanks to all for the help.
The drive does checkout OK with Check4GB.
I moved most things off to the external HDs, then repartitioned (again into five) and reformatted the internal HD, reinstalled OS 3.1. All seemed to be well, but on reboot the supposed boot partition still showed up as a non-DOS device? All the other partitions are as they should be!? If I look at it with HDtoolbox, it's shown as bootable and seems to be fine.
I'm baffled (and getting crazyish).
Thanks again.
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Hi
Have you verified the drive. You can struggle all you might but there may be a physical problem with the drive. I would get another drive and see if you get the same problem. I got through three hard drives once on an A1200 tower before I realised I was just unfortunate to have picked up three old dodgy drives. Even of late on a Win98 machine I have for file transfers, I recently had two crappy drives off Ebay. By nature a 4GB drive is gonna be an old drive now and they do have limited life sadly.
scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com
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Actually the drive verified fine. HDtoolbox doesn't want to allow a low-level format... so I was thinking of dropping it into a Win machine and slicking it there. Does that make any sense?
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I once had a problem with a drive with a b0rked RDB which I couldn't partition. I put the drive in a Windows machine, did a zero fill, then it partitioned ok on the Amiga. Of course you should back up before you do this :-)
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moto
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frl9lk wrote:
I now get the message HD0: Not a DOS Device.
Needless to say, I want too try to re-install that drive/partition without losing everything.
I have only ever managed to get the data from such a partition using Quarterback-Tools. I chose the option to recover to a different partition. After which I quick formatted the NDOS partition and copied the data back again.
Not sure if/where you can download from though?
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On HDToolBox there is a button called "verify data on drive".
What it does? Check the entire drive for bad clusters (or a problem in the surface of the drive.
It's a veeeeery long operation (some like 6~22 hours to perform in a 4Gb drive), but after that the parts of the drive with problems will not used anymore (saving you from real problems).
Also Quarterback Tools use a different approach: the "sub-program" checks the files, when it found a bad "cluster", it move the file from there and assign the bad cluster to a dummy file (read-only and hidden).
BTW: using another file systems you don't have the problems you mention.
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The problem is resolved -- cause still unknown. A :pint: definitely helped. Amiga.org is a lifesaver. :Cheers!:
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scuzzb494 wrote:
Whats WHDLoad ? Sorry.
Click here to be educated (http://www.whdload.de/) :-)