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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: rvo_nl on May 29, 2020, 07:47:46 PM
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Hey guys, its been a while. But I could use some tech advice here. All of a sudden my hard drive stopped working. At first I suspected my Ide-Fix, then my Gayle / IDE port but now I found out with a newly bought a1200 that it is probably the HD itself after all. It's a 120GB IDE Seagate.
When I check it out in HDToolbox it shows up as 'Unknown' with no further Partition information. I really want to get it working again since it contains a lot of data (I have backups but not up to date ones).
Now, I suspect the RDB got damaged somehow. I've used the ReadRDB program from Aminet in the past so I do have a backup of my RDB. But ofcourse I am very hesitant to just overwrite the RDB. What I did try though, is backup the current RDB but then it tells me it 'cannot allocate 10MB+ for RDB'. The RDB file I wanted to restore is just 137kb, how can the RDB have grown that big?
a) Is this huge RDB a symptom of it being faulty?
b) are there any salvaging tools I could try, first? Or something that inspects the RDB?
Any other ideas are welcome.
Edit: Ok I have managed to make a backup of the RDB as it is now (indeed 10MB+ in size), by plugging in the ppc card and providing external power.. such a hassle! But it's done so that should make it a bit safer to restore my old RDB.
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Before you start any repair attempt you should find a computer that can run Linux and has an IDE connector. This you will use to make an image of the whole drive, if possible.
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Before you start any repair attempt you should find a computer that can run Linux and has an IDE connector. This you will use to make an image of the whole drive, if possible.
Hmm, that will be a little tough, but I may have access to one such machine at work. What tool should I use to do that, and how can I restore the drive back to another one? Even if it is of a different specification?
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Hm. Can you actually connect the harddrive to another computer? At home?
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Hm. Can you actually connect the harddrive to another computer? At home?
You mean apart from the other Amiga with HD?
I think I have some ATA-SATA adapter so I can probably hook it up to my pc. What did you have in mind? :)
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The very same. Run an OS that doesn't care much about it and make an image. You can run Linux from a live CD on almost anything.
You can use Windiskimager too, but Windows will probably try to fondle with the drive, so Linux is better.
At last resort WinUAE can be used to access the drive in read-only mode to copy the contens.
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thanks, that is a great idea. I will first try to restore my RDB though. at least I now have a backup of the current one.
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It seems solved. Was able to restore the RDB and everything shows up again. Going to find a good backup drive to prevent this from happening again :D Thanks for the help.