Hi Everyone,

Due to a long an involved story, the hard drive on my A1200 is now more
or less unusable, although the data on it still appears perfectly intact.

This is most frustrating as the drive in question is 800MB and I dont
want to start from scratch again!

It all started when I tried to copy a 40MB AVI file from my PC to the
Amiga (dont ask why! :) using NComm2 on the Amiga side. A good 2 1/2
hours worth at 38400. Anyway, needless to say, NComm crashed at about
33MB. When the machine rebooted, the filesystem validated the partition
automatically, however the file was showing a size of 0 bytes, even
though 33MB was infact there.

So, out came trusty old Disksalv 2, which, until now, had served me well.

I ran it in repair mode, and it seemed to fix the problem, but I noticed
that when it got to the "hash check" stage, part way through it seemed
to get stuck at a certain point, with just brief flicks of hard drive
activity. After leaving it for nearly 1/2 hour (!) it moved on, and
finished the job....

By now I was starting to suspect something was amiss, although I pretended
everything was OK, as I didnt want to start from scratch again. This was
probably my mistake...

Things kept working fine for another couple of weeks, and then yesterday
the machine crashed while copying a file onto the hard drive. Naturally
when it rebooted, the filesystem started validating automatically, *BUT*
the filesystem process (DH0) is now CRASHING after about 2 1/2 minutes,
and BEFORE the validation process is finished! It will then reboot, and
try to validate again, and crash.....and so on. If I dont stop it, it will
do this AGAIN and AGAIN, and AGAIN....

This is EXTREMELY frustrating, as for the 2 or so minutes you have to
look around before it crashes, it is obvious that everything is intact,
I just cant stop the validation process from crashing.

I have tried EVERYTHING I can think of.

I have tried loading Disksalv, and getting it started in Repair mode, then
using XOper to FREEZE the DH0 process, putting the validation on hold. This
allows Disksalv time to complete its job, BUT Disksalv reports no problems
are found, and the problem is still there when its finished. (And its still
getting stuck at the same place during the hash check too :-(

I have tried installing a compatible, but different filesystem,
Multiuserfilesystem, in the hope that it doesnt suffer from the same bug
(?) that fastfilesystem does, but that didnt help.

I am beginning to feel like running my A1200 over with the car, so someone
please help me before I hurt my AMI ;-)

Regards,
Simon




... I'm not lazy, I just love convenience!
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