Help, the Syndicate murdered my HD!!

[Amiduffer]

Oh no, the game Syndicate might have damaged my HD! I tried installing the game onto my HD, and part way through, because of a bad track on the floppy, caused an error. I rebooted, started erasing what had been installed so far, and at a certain file, started making a loud clicking sound, as if the head were hitting something. I stopped, rebooted, and started to run the repair program, and on two files in particular, the program is taking forever to get through that sector. Plus when I rebooted, it was taking much longer to load WB.

Suggestions?? Will I have to reformat the entire drive to get it back to normal or is the HD damaged now?

[PMC]

It's happened to me in the past with Syndicate too, so I can symptahise.

Firstly, the fact that WB is taking much longer to load than normal isn't too much to worry about.  If your Amiga detects a validation error on the hard disk, it will attempt to repair the damage itself so the best thing to do is boot your system and don't go near it until the drive light extinguishes.

Once this procedure has taken place you'll be in a better position to assess the damage to your drive.

Do you have more than one HDD?  

[Piru]

Syncicate has this problem because it only enables system multitasking for a very brief moment when saving data to HDD. The delay is too short for the filesystem to actually record the buffered changes to the HDD, thus filesystem will be left in inconsistent state. With PFS this means that the save doesn't work at all (PFS reverts to older consistent state, without the saved files).

I once fixed this by making Syndicate delay much longer after writes (4-5 seconds instead of the insanely short delay).

I can't remember if the installer already did something silly, but IIRC it was quite crude.

[Amiduffer]

Yech! Icky.

Oh well, better play it from floppies then. Just to be safe, I'm going to take everything off that partition that I can and reformat it.

I have two HDs and the one Syndicate was on didn't have much important stuff thank goodness.

[ajlwalker]

Crikey, sounds like I was lucky when I installed it all those years ago!