Harddisk validation error? How to fix?

[Imerion]

My amiga crashed while I was saving a file, and when I try to start it the harddrive won work. It says error at ####. When I start Wb from a disk it says the hd isnt validated. How do i fix this?

[ldituri]

Disk Salv from Dave Hayne... We may still have them in stock....

[Brian]

Sometimes that won't work and then there's just one thing left to do... format... after a backup have been made of cause (one or more files will be corrupt so make sure to replace these, problem is to find it/em).

[restore2003]

try this:

TurboVal

 :pint:

[chris]

Not this one again.  This should be in a FAQ of common Amiga problems  :-)

Firstly, DO NOT, under any circumstances, use FFS's "Directory Caching" mode on hard drives.  Use good old FFS Intl (International) instead.  This is likely to be the root cause of the problem.

Now you have experienced the effects, unfortunately it isn't terribly easy to fix.  The only way around it is to get DiskSalv (and ReOrg can help too) to lock the problem partition before the error appears.

Hopefully you have DiskSalv or ReOrg (preferably both) safely on hard drive or floppy where you can get to them quickly.  Boot with no startup-sequence and very quickly launch DiskSalv, partition, validate before the error kicks in.  Reboot when it finishes, don't click OK (DiskSalv always crashes when it finishes here, but I am told OKing the requester causes the original validation to undo the work disksalv has done, so don't do it).  If you have no luck with DiskSalv, run ReOrg from no Startup-Sequence and optimise the problem partition (change the FS type to FFS-Intl while you're at it!).

This is the only way to fix the problem, if it doesn't work then you will need to reformat, but that could be troublesome too - you will most likely need to trash the RDB otherwise the validation will crash before you have chance to format it.

Good luck!
Chris