I finally decided to boot one of the old 68K amiga systems I have lying around my place.
This one is a towered 1200 with Apollo 68040, Mediator1200 with Voodoo3000 PCI, 32MB RAM and a 20GB hard disk running OS3.9.
It hasn't been used in a long time. It booted fine, but I discovered that the last partition on the disk is allegedly validating. I say allegedly, since there's no observable disk activity.
Anyway, I changed the backdrop image to a plain colour and the machine spat out an error claiming an "Error 45" occurred with ENVARC:sys/wbpattern.prefs.
I went on to discover that pretty much any operation other than reading files from the hard disk results in the same error message.
I've never seen this one before. I thought most of the AmigaDOS error return codes were 2xx. Any ideas?