Help - Amiga Hard drive crashed

[Angus]

Hi all,
My Amiga 1200 wouldn't boot up last night, and I saw a hard drive error message come up as it tried. This is a 1200 060 Mediator/Voodoo OS3.9 setup. I'm using a little portable TV to display at the moment.

I booted Quarterback tools from floppy, and although DH0: didn't show as a drive any more, it did as a device, and I selected Analyse and Repair from the options. Quarterback found about 10 or 12 error (I selected repair on each) then I got a software error, with a Reboot or Suspend requester - I tried this several times, always with the same result.

I have QB tools and an old version of HDTools on floppy. Although I can see my DH1 partition, there are several other partitions that I can't see, I guess because they are beyond the 4 gig limit. I would like to recover them if possible, as they are mostly not backed up. I have a quarterbacked backup of DH0 on CD, if I could find a way of formatting DH0 and then restoring from the backup, would the extra partitions reappear - does Quarterback save that info?

Or is there something clever I could do with HDTools.

Not too sure on the best way to proceed.

I have another HD with a bootable workbench on it, so possibly I could make that the master and the damaged HD the slave and try to repair it from that vantage point.

Any suggestions, chaps?

[zipper]

The only tool that works on over 4GB area is DiskMonTools.lha from Aminet, it can salvage the files.
Using Repair option on any tool is the last resort as it writes back and can cause new errors - always salvage into another partition/HD!

[mikedouble]

I have another HD with a bootable workbench on it, so possibly I could make that the master and the damaged HD the slave and try to repair it from that vantage point.

Angus,

I think this is your best bet. It sounds likely from the multiple disk errors that you have, that the disk is failing and getting bad blocks.

I was once told that if a modern disk starts showing bad blocks, it's screwed. This is because the disk already has a number of spare blocks on it. These spare blocks are used to replace bad blocks that the disk has found itself, so once these have ran out, you already have lots of bad blocks that you never knew about.

If you make your spare disk the master and install the appropriate tools or filesystem to access your partitions above the 4GB barrier, you should then be able to recover the data to the spare disk, or a new disk that is big enough.

Hope thats helpful

Mike

[Daedalus]

Once you can boot from a drive with the setpatch updates, you should be able to see all partitions. I take it you didn't make a recovery diskette, no? That will allow the use of the newest setpatch and the CD-Rom and graphics drivers, making recovery much easier. Worst case scenario you can juggle a few floppies and put a recovery disk together yourself using CrossDOS and a PC, provided you have an old Workbench 3.0/3.1 floppy floating around...

[Angus]

Thanks guys. sorted now - I think.  

I didn`t have any luck with QB Tools or Disksalv  - I managed to get a CD up and running from floppy and then restor a Quarterbacked image on to DH0 - at this point all the other partitions returned.

Hopefully, she is fixed.  

[rodney37]

In my experience harddisks can develop bad sectors for different reasons:
Mostly a bad sector is caused when a harddisk is suddenly interrupted while it is processing some disk activity.

This can be caused by several occurrences such as:
- resetting your Amiga during disk activity
- a sudden power loss during disk activity
- other sudden interruptions of disk activity

Either of these could possibly develop a bad sector, so whenever possible the above should be avoided.

A bad sector as I understand it consists of a sector whose magnetic levels are undefined/not changable. It's not necessarily physically damaged, just magnetically faulty.

There are some software tools which can magnetically regenerate any bad sectors often even to such an extent that data which was previously lost can be read afterwards as if nothing happened. Specifically there is a tool called "HDD Regenerator" which can repair a harddisk's bad sectors magnetically at the sector level which does work to recover previously unreadable data. The software actually estimates which magnetic level a certain bit on the disk was set to before it became bad. After using this tool the harddisk could still give years of use because the bad sectors are often not caused by wear but by some incident. The tool is developed for PCs but since it works at a sector level which is absolutely filesystem independant it could also benefit an Amiga harddisk when a PC is available.

There is another possible cause for bad sectors on a harddisk which is simply wear. I once opened a harddisk which could not be saved anymore and found that the disk inside was really worn out, it had even developed very fine scratches along it's surface.

Of course, also care must be taken not to let a spinning harddisk be subjected to sudden movement. This could cause the heads to touch the spinning disks and create a scratch or worse.

I read that you got your data back which is really great. I just want to give some extra general info about this subject, also for others who read this thread.  :-)

[Angus]

rodney37 wrote:
This can be caused by several occurrences such as:
- resetting your Amiga during disk activity
- a sudden power loss during disk activity
- other sudden interruptions of disk activity

I read that you got your data back which is really great. I just want to give some extra general info about this subject, also for others who read this thread.  :-)

Thanks Rodney, nice one.

And yes, I was investigating a software problem somebody was having and I launched a mysterious exe file to see if I could help. This caused the system to freeze, but stupidly I'd done this while I had an e-mail reply to the guy still open.    

At least it was in a good cause.