Amiga HD question

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Can anybody recommend a program that will completely wipe out 1 partition on a hard drive?  I found WipeDisk on Aminet, but this looks like it does the entire drive, not just a single LUN.

Thanks,
Mike

[Im>bE]

Try Windows. It is good at such things.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Im>bE wrote:
Try Windows. It is good at such things.

 :-o

I've already thought of this, if I can't find anything else...

[chris]

What's wrong with doing a full format?  That should completely wipe it.  Or you could delete the contents and run ReOrg in "clear empty sectors" mode.  If you're using Amiga filesystems I very much doubt anybody is going to be able to get any data off it anyway (unless they know it's an Amiga drive).

Chris

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

chris wrote:
What's wrong with doing a full format?  That should completely wipe it.  Or you could delete the contents and run ReOrg in "clear empty sectors" mode.  If you're using Amiga filesystems I very much doubt anybody is going to be able to get any data off it anyway (unless they know it's an Amiga drive).

Chris

Hi Chris,

That's a very good question, with an unfortunately stupid and complicated answer.  Both ReOrg and Format require the partition to be mounted in order to work on it.  However because it is a DC-FFS partition that's become invalidated, as soon as I mount it my 1200 crashes (not enough memory to validate, etc.)   Do you remember our previous thread from a couple weeks ago?  Yep, this is the same problem still.  Between work & school I don't have much time to play with my Miggy.

So anyhow, if I disable the partition from early startup control I can boot just fine on my 3.1 backup partition, but the only program that can see the evil nasty 3.9 partition when it's unmounted is HDToolBox, which sees it, and claims to be doing things to it, but which isn't. :-(  So I need to first wipe this partition out, then reformat it, then reinstall 3.9, unless DiskSalv can manage to do it's magic (it's on about it's 20th try this very minute - I've been able to catch it in the about 2 seconds time frame there is before the crash).

Many thanks,
Mike

[whabang]

Exactly what did you try to do with HDToolbox?
Unfortunately, there's no "Partition Magic"-like program for the AMiga... :-(

[Thomas]

You could install SFS or PFS3 on this partition, then format it and then change it back to FFS (if you like FFS).

You could also use TSgui or a similar program to write a non-ffs image to that partition.

Or you could move the end of the partition a little bit lower, format it and then move the end back.

There are so many possibilities. Just be creative.

Bye,
Thomas

[benJamin]

I am currently testing a drive for the first time without directory cache because of this awful problem.

After about ten experiences with this, I'm pretty confident of the solution.

Boot with no start-up, run DiskSalv as quickly as possible and 'Repair' the drive after locking out DOS (in the menus, somewhere).  This should give DiskSalv all the time it needs to repair the disk.

When the 'You will need to reset' requester appears, reset as soon as there is no activity.  If you answer this requester, AmigaDOS will attempt to continue validating the disk, ruining all that time (in my case, a 512Mb partition takes about 10 hours).

Don't bother doing anything else with your machine.  Leave DiskSalv as the ONLY process.  Just turn the monitor off and walk away (frustrating, I know).

If this doesn't work, there are other ways, but they're even less fun (especially if the drive contains multiple instances of the same directory structures with half of the entries marked as 'deleted', very complicating...).


Hope this helps.

benJamin

[Jope]

Hi! Not wanting to sound anal, but I must mention that LUNs and partitions are two different things.

One SCSI ID can be divided into several LUNs. For example: imagine a CD tower with 7 CD drives. It takes up only one SCSI ID but behind this ID there are 7 Logical Unit Numbers, one for each CD drive.

A partition is a partition, it's written to a disk that's visible as some LUN on some SCSI ID on some SCSI bus. Most usually on desktop systems the LUN and SCSI bus number are both 0. The SCSI ID of course changes depending on what the jumpers on the drive say. :-)

Of course a similar scenario like the CD tower one can exist, and you have several physical disks behind one SCSI ID, all having their own LUNs. This requires some sort of intelligent external SCSI box to handle the translation between the drives in the box and the SCSI bus that is connected to the box. You usually need to go to a server farm to see this, I haven't seen too many people with enclosures like that connected to their workstations. :-)

Anal mode off.. Thanks to all those who listened and learned something new. Sorry for those I offended with my carelessly placed words. Seriously. ;-)

[Druideck]

Could you boot an WB install floppy and use HDToolbox
from there to delete or repartition the harddrive?
Then you wouldn't have to depend on the
hardrive not to crash while trying to fix it.

[elendil]

as tomas and, I think, Druidek pointed out, just open hdtoolbox, pick the partition and change the dos type identifier thingie to something else, for instance just random values, exit, save changes, click yes, when it says it will destroy your partition, and off you go, no more invalidations

Of course you need to change it back to ffs or whatever filesystem afterwards, to be able to use it.

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[Framiga]

@Jope

Yes but AFAIK they are RAID with an its own Raid controller.

They are seen by the system, like a single device with the same ID (used with A/V apps and server)

Ciao
.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Jope wrote:
Hi! Not wanting to sound anal, but I must mention that LUNs and partitions are two different things.

Yes, of course you're right, Jope.   :-)   My hard drive setup is so messed up it confuses even me sometimes!  :-o

Currently it's like this (please note that "SCSI" is actually A1200 IDE with 4xEIDE interface)

SCSI Address 0, LUN 0:  split into 2 Partitions:  WB3.1 & Storage, HD0: & HD1:
SCSI Address 1, LUN 0:   WB3.9, HD0.1:
SCSI Address 1, LUN 1:  Work, HD1.1:
SCSI Address 1, LUN 2:  Games, HD2:
SCSI Address 1, LUN 3:  Data, HD3:
SCSI Address 1, LUN 4:  Storage, HD4:

(Oh, and there's a CD1: & CD2: floating around somewhere, too :-D )

Blah blah blah, so anyhow, when I ment one LUN, I ment SCSI Address 1, LUN 0, which for me is partition HD0.1, my invalidated Workbench3.9 partition.

>>>>>>>>>>
@all -

Thanks for all the suggestions, will have to give it one last go before sticking the drive in my PC.  Especially interesting is the suggestion for changing the size in HDToolBox.  What I'd been doing before was going to Partition Drive, deleting the partition, creating a new identical one (FFS Intl., not DC-FFS), saving & rebooting.  This doesn't seem to work, even though it claims "all information will be lost" because I've noticed on subsequent passes of DiskSalv that in fact the information is all still there.  I don't know if this is a testimony to DiskSalv's ability to still read the disk, or if the disk is just not being repartitioned.  I'd think the latter, perhaps only because in it's invalid state it can't be repartitioned?   :-?  Doesn't seem to make sense.  Regardless, DiskSalv still usually chokes sometime around the first couple blocks on the "HD0.1 Program Failed" error, even with the dos lock.  Ah well, back at it, and thanks again!! :-D  :-D  :-D

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
P.S. - Semi-related topic, does anybody know what sort of disk format the Pegasos uses?  Is it SFS?  I already know about needing the CatWeasel to do floppy disks, but can Pegasos read Amiga formatted hard drives?

P.P.S.  I swear to God I will never again use a DC-FFS formatted partition, not even on a Professional Amiga 2000HD!!  :-D  :-D

Best,
Mike

[Thomas]

First you should rename the HD0 and HD1 partitions on SCSI address 0 so you get rid of these ".1" names on address 1. Having multiple partitions with the same name can cause heavy problems on other setups.

Second, these "partitions" that you call "LUNs" actually *are* LUNs, not partitions. The Elbox FastATA (aka 4xEIDE) splits large HDDs into 4GB portions and mounts them as LUNs. For AmigaOS each LUN is a different HDD. So you can certainly use any HDD wipe program on this LUN. In order to do least damage, you can use my program KillRDB which just changes the RDB id. This can be changed back by the same program in case something went wrong.

http://home.t-online.de/home/thomas-rapp/killrdb.lha

Without an RDB the HDD appears as empty. For your setup this means one LUN appears as empty. It could be repartitioned and reformatted.

BTW, you could also try to boot without startup-sequence, then quickly (before the disk-validator fails) do a quick format of the partition and then reboot. This is probably faster than all the effort of unmounting and wiping the HDD. You can also get back the data with DiskSalv.

Bye,
Thomas