Floppies won't work and HD trouble, too!

[Rogue]

Hi everyone

My 25 year-old A500, which was working fine a few weeks ago has a developed a weird problem: it doesn't recognise floppy disks anymore. The drive clicks away, but when I put a disk in, nothing happens, and when I'm on windows (via my hard drive) there's no floppy disk icon. Now, I know what you're thinking - oh, the internal drive's knackered. That's what I thought, too, except for 2 things:

First, I have 2 external drives and the same thing is happening (or rather not happening) with them. I also have a kickstart switcher, so I've tried booting from DF1: or DF2: in 3.1 mode. Still nothing, and when I type `dir DF0:`into Shell, it tells me no disk is inserted.

Second, I loaded XCopyPro and was able to format and copy disks using all 3 drives.

Separate to this, my hard drive has its own problems. DH0: is the main partition, formatted in 1.3 and has a read/write error, so it’s basically read only now. DH1: is a much smaller partition in 3.1 mode and works fine (hooray!) except that since my floppy drive isn’t working, I can’t use my usual method of transferring control to that partition.

Assuming my floppy drives are out of action permanently, does anybody have any bright ideas on how I might at least salvage my hard drive? I have my hard drive formatting and partitioning software installed, but I don’t know if I can manipulate the same drive that I’m running the software from!
Any thoughts?

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Rogue

when I type `dir DF0:`into Shell, it tells me no disk is inserted.

Try diskchange df0: first.

since my floppy drive isn’t working, I can’t use my usual method of transferring control to that partition.

How does this method work?

[Rogue]

Thanks for such a fast response!

Good thought on the Diskchange. I'll try that tonight.

My usual method for transferring control to DH1: is really simple

Switch to 3.1 mode
Insert a floppy in DF0: with a simple startup sequence that just assigns c: s: libs: etc to DH1: and then run execute s:startup-sequence.

[thomas]

So you have one partition with 1.3 and one with 3.1. But it always boots 1.3 if you don't have a floppy disk in the drive? You could have solved it by a simple if statement in 1.3's startup-sequence.

Now that 1.3 is write protected your best bet to boot 3.1 is to hold down both mouse buttons after a reset and select the 3.1 partition in the early startup menu.

If 3.1 is not shown in the ESM, then it probably is not marked as bootable. In this case you should press Ctrl-D early after a reset when the CLI window appears. Then enter the commands to assign libs: etc. to DH1 manually and run HDToolbox from 3.1's tools directory.

In HDToolbox you can change DH1 to be bootable and you can also increase its boot priority above that of DH0. Then it will always boot from DH1.

That done you should examine the error on DH0. What is the exact error message? Does it really say read/write error or does it say something about a checksum error?

Use shell commands or DOpus or the like to examine the directory structure. Does the error appear always or only when you access a certain directory or a certain file?

If you can narrow down the error to just one directory or even better to just one file, you can use this command to remove the directory entry and possibly make the partition writable again: http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/Detache

However, if the error is a hardware error, i.e. a real read/write error on the magnetical layer of the disk, then your HDD is dying and you should replace it ASAP.

[Rogue]

Floppy issue is sorted - I had a malfunctioning DF1: which was causing problems with the system. Removed it and both my internal drive and my remaining external are both fine fully functioning floppies. (Try saying that when you're drunk!)

As for my hard drive, the exact error report is "key 23016 bad header type" or in 3.1 mode "checksum error on disk block 23016"

[zipper]

Disksalv needed.

[Rogue]

Fortunately had enough space on DH1: to move over the essentials temporarily. Then quick reformat of DH0: copy stuff back and everything's working again. Thanks for the help!