Volume DH0 not valildated

[heatdave]

I teach at a Jr High and have been using a Video Toaster in an Amiga 2000 for over 10 years for our morning announcements.  It has worked great all of these years.  Now I am having problems that we could not save our credits pages.  I checked and sure enough the DH0 drive is completely full.  I went into it to try and delete some files to clear up some harddrive space.  Every time I try I get the message "Volume DH) not validated".  I do not know what to do to free up the space I need.

Please Help

Thanks

Dave

[CDE_MusiX]

probably your disk is very full to alterate the RWED sector-controller of your HDD...

[Ilwrath]

Ahh... Well, the actual problem is that your hard drive partition went unvalidated.  (When that happens, the Amiga marks the drive as 100% full to stop further writing and corruption of data.)

Something like Dave Haynie's DiskSalv should do the trick for you.  And the best part, it's free!  (legally!)  

Also, if you have a copy of QBTools, that'll fix the drive up for you too.  (That was a popular backup/tools program back in the day.)

Hopefully you have a way of getting files to and from your Amiga.  If not, pose that question, and I'm sure someone here can help you out there, too.  ;-)

[Thomas]

@heatdave:

First of all you shouldn't need to do anything. Just watch it. The HDD light should show the HDD being very busy. Also the boot process should need about twice as long as usual. If this is true, just wait for it to finish. It should validate itself automatically. Only if in the end of the validation process you get a message like "checksum error in block xxx" or "block yyy used twice" or something like that, then it is not able to repair itself and only then you need one of the recovery tools mentioned above. But first let it finish its work.

You didn't mention your system configuration. With Kickstart 1.3 and below you need a file called Disk-Validator in the L directory of the boot drive. If the file is not present, the partition cannot validate itself. In this case, you have to boot from a Workbench floppy disk with this file in the right directory. But only on Kickstart 1.3 and below. Since Kickstart 2.0 this file is in ROM.

Bye,
Thomas

[motorollin]

You probably don't need DiskSalv or QBTools. Just wait until the hard disk light goes out and then it should be validated. If it's not, then copy all the data off of the drive, format it, and then copy the files back on. If the drive won't validate itself, and you can't copy the files off of it, then DiskSalv ot QBTools may be your only option.

--
moto

[Daedalus]

Indeed, that's probably your best bet alright to copy all the data off to a separate partition, format it and then copy it back. It may fail part way through though if there's a corrupt file somewhere. If it does, leave out that file and copy everything else across, as usually there's only a single corruption that causes this.

[heatdave]

Thanks for the info.  Now to ask for your suggestions.  I did finaly find DiskSalv but now I need to get it on to the machine.  I found out my floppy drive is having problems.  I do remember that it is the old single density 800K drive.  Can I swap this out with a standard PC Double Density 1.4meg drive?  Will it recognize the drive and can I use standard PC formated disks.  If that will not work that I do have another Amiga 2000/toaster that I can swap the drive with.  If I have to do that then the question is how to get the software on the disk as my PCs will not read and right to the Amiga formated disc.

If I can get DiskSalv to solve the problem then great.  If not then I assume I need to do the copy the drive off to another and then reformat the disk.  Well can I hook up a standard PC harddrive?  Will the Amiga recoginize it?  Can I and do I need to then reformat the drive to do the transferes?

One last possible path is I think that I have some kind of SCSI card in the machine.  Should I pursue trying to put a SCSI drive on it?

Thanks for the help

dave

[Piru]

@CDE_MusiX

probably your disk is very full to alterate the RWED sector-controller of your HDD...

You know, nothing in that makes any sense.

EARN MONEY when surfing WEB & FORUMS!

Oh please... Don't we have enough spam already?

[zombi]

You have three options.

1. You can send the software to Amiga by using null-modem cable and Amiga Explorer software by Cloanto.

2. You can format 770k double density floppy under MS-DOS, and use this to transfer data between windows and workbench using crossdoss under workbench

3. You can read/write to Amiga formatted harddisk on PC using WinUAE  

[TjLaZer]

A PC drive cannot be used, unless it has been modified.  And only some brands will work easier than others.  I was able to get a few Teac and Chinon drives converted.  Try to clean the heads of your drive first.  Mount PC0: with CrossDOS and you can read a 720k PC FAT 12 disk that you copied the files to.  If you have KS 1.x you will need to obtain a PC filesystem driver like CrossDOS, Messydos or Fat95.

Good luck that is all the fun, getting old systems running!

[Jose]

Is the HD also 10 years old ? If it's bigger than 4.3 Gb DON't use any of those old tools!

[amigagr]

if you can find an old scsi hard disk you can connect it to the controler, format it and transfer the files. probably your controler is a GVP 2000 HC+8 or similar. you can find more info at the big book and maybe the correct software at installer heaven

the same think happend to me back in 1995 with an a2000 at work, and i back up the 40mb disk in floppys... format it, and restore data back to the disk. it tooks me more than a week, but it was the first step to start understanding the way that amiga dos and workbench operates.

[amiganut4k]

Piru wrote:
@CDE_MusiX

probably your disk is very full to alterate the RWED sector-controller of your HDD...

You know, nothing in that makes any sense.

EARN MONEY when surfing WEB & FORUMS!

Oh please... Don't we have enough spam already?

Talking about SPAM :roll:

And as far as I know the post you made didn't add anything at all to this topic.

[ontopic]

My bet would be to use DiskSalv or QBTools. You should be able to read MS Dos/Windows formatted DD disks. That would be the easiest way to transfer files from the PC to the AMiGA. Unless you have a CD ROM drive in your AMiGA. That way you could burn the files to a CD and transfer them to your AMiGA. And if that doesn't work/isn't an option I guess the only option left is to backup the files to another HardDrive and format the invalid partition/drive. All of this can be a huge pain in the ass when you have no spare AMiGA or a working method to transfer files from a PC to an AMiGA.

[TjLaZer]

I think his only option is to add another HD and format, then transfer all data over.  I doubt he has a CDR(W) connected and configured!

[Amiga4k]

This is going to take a bit more than usual to answer. Let's back track 10 years. You really need to know what you have inside the case for more helpful answers.

(1) Formatting the original drive: NO... NO... NO.... Unless you have all the Toaster software, and manuals.
(2) System specs has not been declared. I guess: an original A2000 Toaster, AmigaDOS 2.04 likely, and a SCSI card, likely an A2091. No CD-ROM drive.
(3) Hard drive is less than 2 gig.

DiskSalv and using a 3.5" disk cleaner package was excellent advice.

I have A2000 internal and external floppy drives. If you need another SCSI hard drive for the transfer, I also have a few under 2 gig that I would pre-format to your specs. Let's not keep kids in the dark without morning announcements.