#Hard Drive Blues
4 messages in this thread
ALL Who Can HELP!
I have aserious problem with my hard drive. It seems that once the
drive gets about 55% full, I get a read/write error. It seems that when I
formatted my drive, I specified the high cylinder to be 614 but beyond
cylinder 608, the harddrive can do no operations. I have a Hardframe
controller which autoboots so it is imnpossible to change the mountlist.
How can I tell AmigaDOS that the hard drive is no go after 608? I already
tried QuarterBack tools with no luck. I also have another problem.
I recently saved a file from deluxe-paint which crashes my computer
every time I try to access it. It also leaves my hard drive with some key
not set. Even when I try to delete it, the computer crashes. QBT did not
find the file corrupt. I don't know what is wrong. Any help on these
problems would be greatly appreciated! After all, I can onl use 55% of my
hard drive BOOO!
-Tim Stonis
Tim,
Unfortunately, the only way to correct your problem with the incorrect
high cylinder is to respecify the high cylinder (via the "rdprep" program
that comes with your HardFrame.). NOTE that by doing this, ALL DATA ON
YOUR DRIVE will be lost, so BE SURE TO TAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR DISK first.
What you'll need to do is to boot from a floppy disk (assuming this hard
disk is your normal system disk), run the "rdprep" program, select "delete
a partition" and choose the partition definition that is incorrect. After
that, select "add a partition" and redefine the partition, specifying the
correct high-cylinder. Remember to save your changes. After making sure
that all disk activity has completed, reboot your system (from floppy disk
again), and then use the AmigaDOS "format" command to high-level format
your drive. To be on the safe side, I strongly recommend that you _do not_
use the "quick" option for the format (even though Microbotics recommends
it) – if you have still specified a high-cylinder that is too high, the
"non-quick" format will fail, whereas the "quick" format won't, which means
that the problem won't be evident until you have started filling your drive
(over approx 55%), as you have found out this time (the hard way,
unfortunately). After successfully high-level formatting the drive, simply
restore your data from the backup and you'll be back in business.
You're not the first person this has happened to, Tim – I've gotten
burned this way when I first set up a couple of hard drives. The problem
is that the manufacturer's specs for the drives tend to be a little
lacking, specifically in terms of the number of USABLE cylinders, heads,
and sectors (as opposed to the number of total cylinders, heads, and
sectors). This is further complicated by the numbers as reported by
programs such as MicroBotics "rdprep" which merely report what the drive
says it has. Unfortunately, sometimes the numbers reported don't account
for the fact that some sectors and/or cylinders are reserved by the drive's
SCSI driver
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to allow it to remap bad blocks.
Hope this helps….
…BobR
Bob,
Thanks a million for your help. It was bad news for me to hear I have
to redo my whole drive, But atleast now I know what's wrong. Thanks again.
-Tim