Hard Drive Woes...

[DiskChris]

The other day my A2000 with Oktagon 2008 and 300 mb scsi drive started giving me gurus awhile after accessing the hard drive, so I went to format it, and put a fresh copy of workbench on. Format went fine, however upon copying workbench, more gurus.  So I threw the drive in a linux box with scsi and ran badblocks (which wrote random data to every sector and attempted to read it back).  It too came back with an i/o error.  However, after that I used dd to zero out the drive. Worked without a hitch. Ran badblocks again, and it worked fine. Waited awhile, and ran it again and again no issue. Thinking I had fixed it, I put it back in the amiga and formatted, coppied workbench, and everything's great...until just now trying to copy a program over amiga explorer, I got a checksum error...If the drive is bad, why would the badblocks tests seem to indicate otherwise?? Could it be a problem with the controller??

[Thomas]

Could be a virus. Bad blocks on a disk usually don't cause gurus.

[ElPolloDiabl]

if the drive is dying it will work some of the time, but then get errors again.
 I've had the exact thing happen with an IBM ide drive. Bad blocks fixed then starts failing again.

[ElPolloDiabl]

Have you tried using it without the ram? Or just do a quick scan of the RAM for errors.
Also did you know the card can't be used with an 060?
If the hard drive is not the problem... Try removing any other cards. Turn the fast ram off etc.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

[Lurch]

Yep, buy a replacement drive :-)

[Ral-Clan]

Could it be a problem with the power supply in the A2000?  Or the power connector to the drive?  I once had a drive that would power up and down randomly because it wasn't getting enough power.

Didn't GURU the system though.

Also might be something that shows up after the drive heats up / is in use for a while.

[Fats]

.If the drive is bad, why would the badblocks tests seem to indicate otherwise??

On Linux you can get more information by using the smartctl utility. More info in the man page. You can get the info by 'smartctl -a /dev/_drive_'

[DiskChris]

Yeah I was afraid it was the drive...I knew it in the back of my mind but didn't want to admit it. I ran the drive connected to the Amiga power supply while in the pc, so I think the power supply is ok (it tested ok in the pc). I downloaded a couple of demos to diskette and those ran ok so I don't think it's the ram....And as far as reading the smart data I think that's an ide/sata thing...besides the drive was made in 1990 so it wouldn't even have that...

[DiskChris]

:roflmao:

[DiskChris]

After trying three different hard drives, all of which tested fine in the pc, I began thinking that it wasn't the hard drive after all. And since I shared the same scsi cable between the pc and the amiga, I knew the problem must the amiga. Using memcheck, I tested the ram a couple times, and it all came back fine. And having actually used the amiga's power supply to power the drive in the pc once, I knew the power supply was probably ok. So I donwloaded oktapussy, and enabled "slow trans" in OktagonPrefs and ever since since it's been fine.