Hard drive obliterated! :(

[Merc]

Hi all,

  My 1200's hard drive seems to have scrambled itself for no apparent reason -- I was copying a bunch of files from one partition to another, and when it finished doing that, I got a checksum error on DH0...   I then rebooted, only to get the message that DH0 was not a DOS disk!  :-(  And, on further investigation, *all* of my partitions had become invalid.  :-(  :-(  :-( I've tried re-installing my RDB from a backup, but HDtoolbox crashes whenever I try this.  It's a 20GB drive so maybe it's getting confused somehow, even though it's the OS 3.5 HDtoolbox.  I can't do anything with the drive in the 3.5 toolbox until I use the 3.1 HDtoolbox to set up a new RDB.  So what I've done at this point is set up one big partition and let disksalv go at the whole drive in salvage mode to try and get the files back.  This seems to work, it picks up lots of files, but crashes when I try to actually salvage them off to another drive!  I tried QuarterBack tools as well but it dies 3% into looking for files!! :-x

Does anyone have any suggestions on what else I could try?  I've got all of the important stuff backed up off that drive, but I'd hate to lose everything anyway..  I do have my Miami key on there and I don't think it's anywhere else, and I'd hate to lose that!

[odin]

AFAIK using disksalv and disktools of the same era on a >4gig HD is suicide. I think you are pretty much screwed.

It always takes a hard lesson to learn to make backups :-D.

[Skippy]

I've got a legal registered Miami Key if your desperate.

You've totally confused me, do you have multi-partitions on the same drive or just one?

I use this little tool to validate my hd:
http://www.aminet.net/disk/misc/wfv.lha
It doesn't state whether it supports 'large' HDs though.

Skippy

[Merc]

Well that's why I ran everything in salvage mode, where it just tries to read stuff off the drive and not write anything...   Hopefully

[Merc]

@Skippy

I did have a bunch of different partitions, yes, but I resorted to setting up just one the size of the whole drive (and just doing a quick format!) so I would have a valid partition to scan.  I've done this before and it does work, mostly

[odin]

@merc:

Ah yes, ofcourse. Salvage is not a fix in place operation =). I understand that DiskSalv does read beyond the 4gig limit ? (even though it can't salvage em).

[Targhan]

Don't feel bad.  You aren't the only one.  The drive in my Amithlon box seemed to have lost it's partition table :-(  I'm trying desperately to find a way to recover the info I can get to by booting off of the cd.

I feel for you. :cry: I have a 2.0Gb SCSI-2 HD that crashed during the middle of verifying the format on it and I used PFS3 to do the work. :-x I think I also lost the RDB info, but I have yet to reload it. Right now, it's a time thing and my main drive is still working (cross my fingers! :nervous: ).

[tonyw]

Yes, I've just lost my system partition, too. I got a series of emails with blank titles from a mailing list, and it made YAM throw up. It crashed, left files open, left the window open on the Workbench, and exited. A real mess. I restarted, waited for disc to be validated, then continued with downloading the email for the day. Next in the blank title thread and it crashed again.

This happened about three times. Now the partition is screwed and I've just spent the last 3 hours salvaging what I could since the last backup (from last week) and reformatting it. Thank God for FFS and Quarterback.

Now rebuilding system partition . . .

tony

[tonyw]

I take it all back, I apologise to YAM. The problem was bad blocks on the partition. So my drive is dying (well, it's an old 1.2 GB Seagate drive, so it's due for a replacement anyway).

Now burning CDs of the other partitions.

tony

[Waccoon]

Ouch.

I had that happen when Shadow of the Beast crashed during the intro.  All I heard was one "click", and the whole hard drive was gone.  There was no DiskSalve back then, but thankfully, I had a complete backup... on 40 floppy disks.

Ah, those were the days.   ;-)

[MikeB]

may be a headache but i try the following:

buy a new drive, and build this with pfs3 filesystem.  Attach your old drive as  a slave and try pfsdoctor to salvage your old drive.

should work!

[Tonyapa]

Try taking all your cables and plugins apart, clean all contacts, and put everything back together very securely.  It worked with me a couple of times.  Finally used contact cleaner where necessary and haven't had a problem for a long time.