DH0: "not a dos disk"

[murple]

Well, it was, but now its not. DH1: which is a partition on the same drive is fine. This is a SCSI 4GB drive on a GVP card.

The drive had been working fine... I'm kind of wondering if it could be a virus. I just mounted the drive in Linux to see if I could mount the partitions. DH1: works fine, so I made a backup image of it. DH0: says "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or other error" and "AFFS: Unknown filesystem on device sda1: 00000021." I used dd to make a backup image of it just in case. The dd image of DH1: looks like you'd expect, with data. I can pick out some file names and contents in the binary. DH0: however looks odd:

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<9F>DOS<9F>DOS<9F>DOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOSDOS
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And on and on for as long as I bothered to scroll.

I did try running DiskSalv on the disk a while ago. That couldn't have mangled it like that, I don't think...

Are there any virii that can cause something like this? Or is this probably a hardware death? If its a virus trashed disk, I can reformat and reinstall. I'm pissed because I had about 100 games and a ton of demos on there which I cant replace, but... unless there's a chance the data is still in there somehow, not much I can do about it.

There any good tools to try and recover this? Does it look like a virus, fuxx0red drive, or something else?

[murple]

I managed to get DiskSalv v4 on the system and started it with Salvage... it went in and did a scan to determine type and said it was a 50% 50% chance it was either FFS or FFS Intl... I picked FFS. Does that mean it found at least part of a filesystem there? Could it be repairable?

[murple]

Yeah it seems to be finding thousands of files... if I can recover the games, demos, and whdload installs, I'll be happy and will replace the physical drive ASAP.

Any suggested mode to run DiskSalv in for this? I picked Salvage, not really knowing if it was a pointless exercise or not.

[murple]

Well, I have no idea if I did the right thing, but it LOOKS like it is...

I had DiskSalv2 off Aminet before and it didnt help much. Then I noticed DiskSalv4 is on the Deathbed Vigil DVD and it seems to be working. There doesnt seem to be any help within it so I just made guesses.

It ran in Salvage mode and after 2 passes, gave me a multipanel window of directories and files, looks like the ENTIRE file system is intact. Could this be an RDB issue after all? Does that make a drive appear non-DOS, or at least non-bootable?

Anyway I clicked a button in the Dirs and Files panels that had a black "i" and an arrow pointing to a white "i"... that seemed to highlight all the stuff. Then the "Salvage" button appeared. I pointed the destination at DH1: and pushed Salvage. I have to go to bed now, so hopefully in the morning I have rescued files!

[murple]

Turns out this is just an educational experience... The drive did get trashed and it is mostly recovering (17 errors so far out of a few thousand files). But even it if blows up horribly, all is not lost. In the box for the GenLock that came with the Amiga I bought, there is a set of CDs with backups of all the games that were on the drive... whew! That was the main concern. I can replace the demos and tools I installed, but the games that came with the computer would take lots of time and money to replace.

After I finish the DiskSalv run, what is the most recommended tool to test a drive for physical problems (as opposed to just screwed up data due to a virus or user error)?

[murple]

I have some floppy thats supposedly a virus checker, but I have no idea how to use it. I'll have to read up on this virus. All these years I've used Linux I've never seen a virus... now maybe I got one on an Amiga of all things? haha fun!

[murple]

Well, I managed to do a recovery of a substantial percentage of the data to the good partition. Im going to take the drive out and mount it under Linux and make backup copies of all the files. I'm then going to repartition and reformat the whole drive (doing a bad block check in the process). I'm inclined to believe this is somehow software related rather than physical damage to the drive... otherwise, I'd expect both partitions to be acting strangely. And there were no real signs of trouble before. I or some program I ran mustve done something stupid.

Since I have the games on CD, and since there were just a few demos on there, all I really care about is getting some of my configs off there.

That said I'm going to look for a new drive ASAP and be careful not to put anything unreplaceable on this one.

I read up on the Lamer virus and it doesnt seem to fit. However, what are the most recommended virus detection/removal programs and where can I get them?