Unusual AmigaDOS error

[Karlos]

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?

[Karlos]

I spotted this thread on another forum.

I wonder if it's scsi.device giving the error?

#define HFERR_BadStatus 45 /* status and/or sense error */

If so, it would be somewhat unusual since the machine used to work fine, it just hasn't been booted in a fairly long time.

[Matt_H]

Read-only operation, in my experience, has always been a symptom of a drive not being validated. Do you have DOpus4 on the machine? Point one of the listers to SYS: or another partition. If it's a validation issue, the free space indicator should be in parentheses (indicating write-protected), or say 0K, or 512K, or some other obviously-wrong value (don't remember exactly which one).

Hopefully this secondary guage of validation status gives you some more clues...

[Karlos]

Well, initially only the topmost partition was invalidated. Now, all but the lowest are.

SYS: is currently on DH1 (DH0 has a lower boot priority atm), which is well under the 4G limit. According to info, it's Read/Write, but all partitions return Error 45 when attempting anything that would modify the contents.

There's not a lot of data on the drive. I think I might shove it into my old PC and recover the data with UAE and repartition it.

[lorddef]

I recall seeing something similar many years ago on my system with a power flyer and a crapped out cdrom. Have you tried stripping the ide down to just the disk?

[jj]

Or just use quarterback tools to sort it out

[ferrellsl]

Wow, Quarterback tools.....that's a name I haven't heard in over 15 years....Had forgotten all about it.