Int. IDE drive checksum errors

[marcfrick2112]

Hello, Hoping someone can help. Lately my internal
8.5 GB IDE hard drive has been reporting checksum errors.
The errors are usually confined to single directories.
(e.g. my James Pond 2 WHDLoad directory last night)
It has occured on 2 different partitions, Workbench and my Games
partition. I can 'fix' it temporarily by backing up the partition and formatting
it, then re-copying the backup. Could my HD be dying? Oddly,
my 2 GB SCSI drive is even older, and I never had a single error.

If the drive is dying, any ideas to copy my old HD data to a new drive?
I don't have any way to back up 8.5 GB right now.
Could I put the new drive in lieu of my CD-ROM just to format and copy the old drive to it?

My Amiga: A1200 PowerTower, DCE 68060 @ 50MHz with SCSI module, 2 MB Chip, 64 MB Fast RAM, OS 3.9,
8.5 IDE drive (Seagate, I think), OS 3.9 with Boing Bag 2 update.

Many thanks for any help

[Acill]

I was having the same types of errors on one of my drives. I formated it and it would still get the errors. It turned out to be a cable. Once I put in a new IDE cable the problems went away after a final format. give it a try and see. IDE drives to tend to wear out faster then SCSI drives from what I have seen though.

Oh and yes you can put in a new drive and copy to it, but keep in mind if the data is corrupt and not the drive itself all you will do is move the bad data over to the new drive.

[that_punk_guy]

Don't assume that newer drives are necessarily more reliable. I have had drives that have lasted a few months and drives that have lasted a decade before failing.

[Thomas]

Could it be that the errors appear in Workbench after you wrote to Games and vice versa ? If so then your HDD is all right but you probably have a problem with the 4GB limit. Get the Check4GB archive from Aminet and run the CheckHD program.

Even if this is not the cause of your problem posting the output of the program might help with the diagnostics.

Bye,
Thomas

[HotRod]

@Thomas

The workbench partition needs to be below 2Gb to be ok. The other partitions/harddrives will work at their full size.

The reason is that they will boot with the 3.1 version of the kickstart before they reaches the patch for the kickstarts (spatch). When the patch is done all harddrives will work at sizes above 2Gb in partition and 4Gb in overall-size of the harddrive.

You shall know that it boots with kickstart before it launches startup-sequence. When it does spatch will be launched.

Regards Jörgen Danielsson

[marcfrick2112]

Thanks to everyone for thier input. I am quite sure that my system is fine with an 8.5 GB HD. I have been running this drive for years, even with OS3.1 (and NSDPatch), this problem only showed its' face recently. Isn't OS3.9 supposed to take care of big hard drives?? My Workbench partition is the first 900 MB's available, BTW. Others are Work: (1.0 GB) Work2: (1.9 GB) Work3: (1.9) and Creative: (1.9 GB).
Marc

[Thomas]

@HotRod: you don't need to explain it to me. I know very well where the 4GB limit comes from and how to deal with it. I have written programs like Check4GB and RDBrecov because of my experiences with it.

@Marc:

Isn't OS3.9 supposed to take care of big hard drives??

OS3.9 does not magically solve all issues. It provides the means to overcome the limits, but you have to use them properly. If you are using the internal IDE controller you should not deactivate the AmigaOS ROM Update neither by removing the file nor by adding "SKIPROMUPDATES" parameters to SetPatch and you have to install the new FastFileSystem on the HDD's RDB.

Additionally you have to take care that you don't use programs which do not support the >4GB software like Disksalv, Shapeshifter, PCTask and many others. Even the original Format program does not support full formatting of partitions above the 4GB limit.

My Workbench partition is the first 900 MB's available, BTW. Others are Work: (1.0 GB) Work2: (1.9 GB) Work3: (1.9) and Creative: (1.9 GB).

Which of them is the Games partition which solidarises with Workbench in having checksum errors ? Please run the CheckHD program and post its output. It gives much more information than what you listed here. It does not harm, it does not even access your HDD. It just reads the internal DOS lists.

If your HDD really has magnetical faults IMHO you wouldn't get checksum errors but rather some read/write errors. IMHO you are running some program that randomly writes to the disk. Either because it does not know about the 4GB limit or because it wants to harm your data (a virus perhaps).

Another possibility is a bad RAM chip or something like that. Perhaps buffers are trashed before or while they are written to disk and when they are read next time the checksums are bad. But in this case you whould get checksum errors from all partitions. Also check cabling and cooling.

Buffers can also be trashed by malfunctioning and crashing programs.

Bye,
Thomas