Validating a hard disk

[Hyperspeed]

I use Dave Haynie's DiskSalv V2 (rev.11.32) 1991-1994.

It's not totally flawless and the problem you have occurred with me a
lot.

I found the biggest problem I had was formatting my drive with
HDToolBox and then trying to alter the SCSI Synch/Reselection bits
with Phase5's SCSIconfig tool.

They had different standards for RDB saving and I would often get
errors like "Error validating drive on block 998989 - out of range"
and stuff like that. In the end I decided to partition and format the
drive solely with Phase5's prep software (even though it's not as nice
to use and not as sophisticated).

I advise you to make notes of your start and end blocks for each
partition, as well as their sizes etc. in HDToolBox so that in the
event you mess up the RDB (Rigid Disk Block) then you can recreate the
partitions and salvage.

In your situation I'd reccomend you get a totally new hard disk as
a swap drive, then copy everything over and reformat the original disk
(making sure to use only ONE prepping program).

You'd be "putting all your eggs in one basket" if you tried to back up
and re-partition a drive with data on.

[Hyperspeed]

I've found that the areas of the disk that are written to the
most are the bits you'll lose.

I would avoid using ReOrg 3.11 if possible as it used to work on IDE
but with my SCSI setup it became very dangerous for some reason.

Best to keep ReOrg for curiosity as opposed to actually defragging.

On the subject though, doesn't AmigaOS3.9 have an inbuilt defragger
like Windows? Also, I asked on another thread if the Amiga had a
disk-surface scanner like the MS-DOS ScanDisk/CheckDisk but noone
seemed to have any suggestions...

I think it's essential to be able to graphically see the surface of a
disk via a GUI to pinpoint bad blocks for remapping. For Phase5
SCSIConfig users we have to risk meddling with HDToolBox (seriously
dangerous if it writes to the RDB).

I know AmigaOS4 has good SCSI support in HDToolBox, pity us 68k users
couldn't get this HDToolBox for Workbench 3.x as it's hardly state of
the art AmigaOne G3 material (prepping a hard disk properly).

;-)