What is the Amiga equivalent of MSDOS ScanDisk/CheckDisk?

[Brian]

If it didn't work you didn't do it right cause for me it have worked everytime. But QB work too so it's a question of taste I belive... we all have our own favourites.

[Waccoon]

man, checkdisk.. THAT is long ago

Windows XP still uses it.  In fact, "chkdsk c: /f" is the ONLY way to fix a hard drive.  The GUI version of chkdsk is useless as it skips over errors if it can't lock exclusive access to the drive (which is always the case with C:).

It is not a good idea to use two different programes like that, you risk data loss.

Yeah, I found out the hard way.  I used a Win2K boot disk to repair an NT4 partition, and the next thing I knew, the NT4 version of chkdsk wouldn't work anymore since the drive had been "updated" with a newer version of NTFS.  What a pain!

I blamed Microsoft at first, but then I realized that many OSes do the same damn thing.

OFS and FFS shouldn't have THAT problem, but touching the RDB could be an issue.

Does Workbench report errors on the drive?

Yeah, courtesy of the Neverending Requester.  :-)

SFS (Smart File System) is better to use than FFS, no more invalid hard drives!

Anything is better than OFS/FFS.

I wish it would do an MSDOS style Defrag too, ReOrg 3.11 (patched) is horribly unreliable and has destroyed my files on many an occasion!

He's right.  If ReOrg runs out of memory or caches too many files, it barfs and leaves you with an invalid hard drive.  ALWAYS back up your drive, first.  ReOrg is NOT the same calibre as defrag utils you get with Windows.  Period.

A good filesystem doesn't get fragmented in the first place, which is why BeOS didn't have a defrag utility.

I have used DiskSalv as well, and that is a very good tool likewise.

I'd do a standard filecopy to any medium possible before running DiskSalv.  For some reason, DiskSalv always locks up every time I try to scan my 85 Meg drive, and I'm worried it'll do more harm than good, since my drive is healthy as it is.

That's why I liked the MSDOS ScanDisk because it would show little circles and squares and automatically map out surface trouble such as bad blocks.

Scandisk was actually written by Symantec, which is why it rocked.  I was very upset when I found newer versions of Windows went back to sucky old chkdsk.

I think I'll go against the grain and say that I never liked disksalv. I don't think it's very intuitive or actually very working.

I agree.  I especially hated the fact that "Verify" and "Salvage" both wrote to the drive, making it a very destructive program (destructive, in the sense that it would risk losing data just from normal investigative operation).

[Holley]

Just for reference chkdsk c: /R is the most thorough under WindowsNT/2K/XP.  Having a check/repair program for OS4 and Morphos would be ... erm ... nice? :-?

[iamaboringperson]

I think you mean command line equivilent?

Years ago I used 'DiskDoctor' Which was crap and often dangerous, however, it certainly helped me recover some lost files when I had a faulty disk drive about 10 years ago.

[Jose]

I've only used diskdoctor and that was way way too many years ago....:-D What would some of your recommend to partitions over 4Gb today with FFS?

[zipper]

> What would some of your recommend to partitions over 4Gb today with FFS?

There's just DiskMonTools, it's quite slow.
Fresh backups do rule...

[kd7ota]

I have had DiskSalv actually mess up one of my partitions and rendered it crap really. The program itself said it was done repairing the partitions, but after the next boot, it was invalid.. :-?

So basically since then, I never touched that program again.

[SilvrDrgn]

If ReOrg runs out of memory or caches too many files, it barfs and leaves you with an invalid hard drive. ALWAYS back up your drive, first. ReOrg is NOT the same calibre as defrag utils you get with Windows. Period.

For the record, I have never, ever had such a problem with ReOrg.  It's always worked great.  Though, I don't use it any more since I have a very large and fast HD now.

[mikeymike]

Windows-related alert!

Waccoon wrote:

man, checkdisk.. THAT is long ago

Windows XP still uses it.  In fact, "chkdsk c: /f"

Err.  chkdsk for NTx is very very different from the old DOS checkdisk/scandisk.  What you've said is like saying "WinXP still uses MS-DOS because you can type 'DIR' at a command prompt and it works".

And that's without going into NTFS vs. FATxx, the fact that NTx uses a different kernel to Win9x/DOS, etc etc...

Also, there are two ways of checking disks in WinNTx (as in, NT4,Win2k,XP and later):

* Get a command prompt up, type chkdsk driveletter: /r
* Go into My Computer, pick a disk, Properties, Tools, Check Now, tick what options you want.  Ticking both does the equivalent of a chkdsk /r.

chkdsk /r does a complete check of the disk.  /f is more of a filesystem check rather than filesystem + bad sector check.

For more useful information, you can do:

chkdsk C: /v /r

Which gives more verbose output as to what is going on.

I normally go for the command line version because it gives more useful information.  Also, chances are that Windows will ask you to restart the computer so it can do it in a more isolated/single-user'y mode.  It logs what it has done in the event log > App Log, under source 'Winlogon'.

If you want to do a quick, useful disk check and stay in Windows:  chkdsk driveletter: .  It'll tell you if it needs you to do a full disk check.  It's kind of a light, read-only, filesystem-only chkdsk.

[Noster]

Hi

If I remember right, you should throw away your SCSI or IDE drive if you find bad sectors after low-level formating. The drive itself is intelligent and hides defects to the "user", so if you find any defect, your drive is trash at all.

I use Amigas with SCSI-drives since 13 years and have never had any problems with bad blocks. The 120MB drive that was initially build into my A3000T dies once ago, but it has got problems to read/write at all, not only specific blocks.

To salvage accidentically deleted files I use Disksalv and it works great for this purpose. Recovering data from a bad disk is luck anyway.

And I still use FFS for my harddisks. It works reliable and the speed is no problem, I use a software-cache (FastCache 1.1 from Philip D'Ath, somehow simular to Smartdrive known for MS products, can be found in Aminet) with a dynamic cachesize upto 16MB and my harddrive is nearly as fast as the ram-disk :-).

Once I tried SFS and getting into troubles, getting error-messages about bad data, where I've never got failures like that using FFS (using FFS on the same drive before and after testing SFS and never got any failure).

> Yeah, I know I need to upgrade ROM&OS but 3.1ROM gives you ages of extra boot seek-time

After I had upgraded to OS 3.1 my systems boot-time was faster by ages than before? Very annoying was the boot-time of a coldstart after upgrading to OS 3.9 because of the extra-reboot after patching the Kickstart, but this problem is solved by the KickflashOS4 :-D

Noster

[odin]

Noster wrote:
If I remember right, you should throw away your SCSI or IDE drive if you find bad sectors after low-level formating. The drive itself is intelligent and hides defects to the "user", so if you find any defect, your drive is trash at all.

IIRC modern harddrives don't actually 'do' a lowlevel format. Or something, not that I have any idea what a lowlevel format actually is :crazy:.

[mikeymike]

From what I understand, most modern hard drives will intercept an attempt to low-level format them, but it is not wise to try them, as low-level formatting generally does bad things to modern hard disks.

IIRC, a low-level format consists of writing zeroes over everything on the hard disk, but also includes resetting drive geometry settings.

[Elektro]

Yeah lowlevel usually means zero fill format, true low level format is only done in factories iirc.

[DonnyEMU]

We used to use DiskDoctor then DiskSalv for RDB drives