help! disk is not a valid DOS partition.

[darksun9210]

hey people, i have a little trouble with a hard disk and need to recover files.

the background:-
i did have an A4000T PPC blah blah blah, and before i sold it, i backed up all my files to an IDE drive, (FFS boot partiton 100Mb, FFS main partition 4.8Gb)
put drive (OS 3.5) into A1200 (3.0 roms) reloaded 3.0 OS on the the system partition.
started having issues and disk errors with the main partition (4.8Gb size). tried to run various disk tools to get some of the directory structure back as i was missing a load of driectories with drawings and technical schematics, pin outs, board designs etc.
ended up running quarterback tools. came up with a load of date errors, fine as it thought the date was 1995, and the A4K having an onboard clock had a date of 2003. so it thought the dates were in the future.
spent ten hours doing a disk block scan, all ok, directory date check all fixed. rebooted.
disk didn't boot.
didn't even show partitions in the early startup menu.
booted off of floppy. no hard disk partitions. ran hdtoolbox. disk appeared fine, went into the partion window and it was showing me the default new disk layout. two partions of roughly equal size.

have i lost everything? my drawings? my pin out listings? my signal traces? all my bought and paid for shareware enabler keys for Mui, SoftCinema, IDEfix, etc? all my apps? is there anything i can do?

if quarterback has lunched my disk then thats it. i have given up with Amiga. no more 10hour disk surface scans, no more mangled directory structures to be put back together by hand,
i've just run out of patience.
or is there something i can do to save it?

disk salv wouldn't have anything to do with it as i didn't have enuff memory to run the requested operation. and yes yes i know i should have had more than one partition for apps and data like i did previously, but i just did one backup to large partiton.
i know all the things i should have done. like not sold my A4K. but is there anything left i can try?
btw, my DDS2 tape drive and backup tapes went with the A4K. i have a couple of DDS2 drives left, but no tapes.

i consoled myself by putting my pc back together and watching a few bad quality futurama episodes before going to bed

[xeron]

i did have an A4000T PPC blah blah blah, and before i sold it, i backed up all my files to an IDE drive, (FFS boot partiton 100Mb, FFS main partition 4.8Gb)
put drive (OS 3.5) into A1200 (3.0 roms) reloaded 3.0 OS on the the system partition.

Well, theres your problem; You have a 4.8Gb partition located 100Mb in from the start of the disk. Kickstart 3.0 has trouble with disks larger than 4Gb, and partitions larger than 2Gb, without special patches installed..

started having issues and disk errors with the main partition (4.8Gb size). tried to run various disk tools to get some of the directory structure back

Eeeek! :-o The disk tools would probably have tried to access the disk with with the wrong parameters due to the size of the partition, and actually corrupted the disk.. :-(

ended up running quarterback tools.

I don't think (though I don't know for certain) that quarterback supports >4Gb drives and >2Gb partitions either...

didn't even show partitions in the early startup menu.
booted off of floppy. no hard disk partitions. ran hdtoolbox. disk appeared fine, went into the partion window and it was showing me the default new disk layout. two partions of roughly equal size.

Sounds like your RDB was knackered...

have i lost everything? my drawings? my pin out listings? my signal traces? all my bought and paid for shareware enabler keys for Mui, SoftCinema, IDEfix, etc? all my apps?

Ehmm... it sounds like it to me...

is there anything i can do?

I'm not sure. Maybe install some sort of NSD device patch, or get an OS3.9 Amiga, and then use RDB Salv to try and re-create the original partition information, and PREY that quarterback didn't kill the partition. I wouldn't expect it to work, though.

have given up with Amiga. no more 10hour disk surface scans, no more mangled directory structures to be put back together by hand,
i've just run out of patience.

:-(

Oh man... I really feel for you.. I've had a couple of 'scares' in my time, but fortunately managed to salvage nearly all of my stuff in both cases, although I did lose some source code that I spent many, many hours on...

[darksun9210]

thanks. i thought as much, i just wanted confirmation, kinda like the doctor giving a verdict and you want a second opinion. all that work over the years... i thought by dropping the filesystem version from 45.1 (OS3.5) to 39.x (OS3.0) i would be ok, and keeping everything within the 4Gb boudary. i used to run that drive no problem in my first 3.0 based A4K. sigh. thanks again, and take care people.
hope amiga lives on in some form or another.
sleep well, signing off.

[MrZammler]

No solution for you, but I know the feeling. My A3000's disk (thank god just the sys partition) got corrupted somehow, and qtback tools totally wrecked it. Lost my year's installation (last backup was pretty old).

[HopperJF]

so i guess the moral of the story is to avoid quarterback tools like the plague eh?

[Thomas]

Well, if the disk is FFS there is a small chance you could get back some of your data. FFS starts its directory in the middle of the partition and spreads its directory entries all over the available space. As only the first 0.8 GB of the partition can be overwritten, most of the data probably could be restored.

Try my program RDBrecov from Aminet (read the docs !) If it is able to find the root block of the partition, we have a good chance to recover everything.

In all cases you must not write to the damaged disk. Connect another HDD to store the rescued data on.

Well, I hope those programs you tried did not write to the disk either, because this could have lead to serious corruption of the file system structure.

Bye,
Thomas