First major HDproblem - help?!

I've recently dug-out my old A1200 from a few years storage and everything was ok till last week. Now i've got alot of bad sector and corrupt boot sectors springing up all over the place so that now each time i try to boot up into workbench it sometimes(and more often) wont. If i look into any of the partitions(there are three of them) i some of the software has started to go missing(ie the files have gone).
This is very bad as i've got about 400mb of great amiga software that will be hard to replace(i don't have the disks for all of the games/programs - most of it came on the HD when i bought the amiga about 6 years ago).
What's worse is i think it might be my fault!

I recently bought a few things from a local amiga supplier :
An Apollo 1230/40 card with 16mb ram
A 4xCDrom in a dual slot case with its own PSU and a squirrel interface.

I installed the Apollo card and had no problem but decided to do a bit of spring cleaning on the HD. I ran Quarterback(6.1) did a load of analyse and repair on all partitions. had a few problems and tried the recover deleted files/data. Ran the analyse and repair again.
Where once i had the occasional 'root drawer corrupt' or 'can't validate hd-1' messages on one particular partion(hd-1), it's now spread over all partitions and as an amiga newbie(ie i only ever played games on it before!) this is scary!!!!:eek
I think the amiga is great and was so chuffed to find it again after all these years!

So what am i doing wrong? Can i save my valuable games/software collection? Is my HD on it's last legs? And anyone got any suggestions before i have a heart-attack.

oh yeah specs:
A1200 2mb chip
Apollo 1230/40 16mb fast
650Mb 2.5 ide hard-drive(nearly R.I.P?)

I looked through the posts and kinda got some answers, but it was mostly not that specific. Like i think i read somewhere that using Quaterback or Disksalv with an accelarator card was not a good idea? if so how can i disable it without having to physically remove it each time? This was a great site to find i've been days going through dead links and old info.

[child of Thor]

just to say the above post was from me - i'm new here and for some reason when i posted it it had me as logged out(although i had logged in!)thnx

[Syko]

1) remove all that loverly h/w you've added - so their's no chance it's causing any probs...

2) use early-startup menu to disable caches (hold l & r mb on power) if available

3) boot from floppy - it'll need disksalve V2 & filemaster on it

4) run disksalve and use repair options, DO NOT delete any problem files

5) copy files using filemaster to another partition (you do say youve got three)

aim to get one partition copied to the others, then delet it, restart, re-create the partition, restart, format partition; DC-FFS if you can, copy files back.

Do the same with the other partitions and you should have completely re-built the drive, with no data loss, other than the unrecoverable

The only other option is to add another HD temporeraly and use disksalve to recover the data to the new drive, then re-build the old drive by re-partitioning/formating it.

Cheers

[child of Thor]

Thanks for the quick reply Syko!

well i follow you up to point number 2! said i was new to this side of amigaring!

for point 3 where do i get disksalve V2 and Filemaster - and more importantly how do i get it onto an amiga disk that i can boot the amiga with?(Amiga not internet connected)

I think i got a whole can of worms about to open on me

EDIT: I started to move my files over using DOpus(5.11 i think) but i now have errors on all three partitions!!

[Amiga1992]

Ahh that sucks. When I get validation errors because my machine rebooted while saving, I copy everything onto one of my partitions and then reformat and copy everything back to it.

If all partitions are screwed, you are in a baaaad situation

[Galahad/FLT]

Sounds like your Power Supply is nearing the end of its life and its having problems supplying enough power to all of your peripherals.

Like someone said before, try removing all the hardware you just added and see what happens on your hard drive.

Also, get a decent Virus Killer, it maybe that you have had an infection that has only just manifested itself.

[child of Thor]

Ok. thanks for the replys.
Took out the accelarator last night - it says it's a 'turbo mk3 - 1230/40' on the box it came in.
My hard drive is a Conner(650mb) and i've got an A500 power supply.
I haven't got Disksalv - just fixDisk1.2(which only seems to do floppies) and QuarterBack. So i started to analyse and repair(with Q.Back) the smaller workbench partition(i think it boots up on this one) - got a reported 210 bad sectors! It got about 17% through the repair options and it came up with 'Cache not found' and quit the process - this is bad right?
I still can kind of boot sometimes - if not it boots with no startup no problems, and i can still access the different hard drive partitions. I'll spend the next couple of days seeing how it goes.

If anyone can tell me how to get Disksalv v2 to use on my amiga that would be great. I'll have to download it on a pc and transfer it by FD to my amiga. I've got a dozen spare amiga DD floppies and loads of pc HD floppies.
edit: On that note i'm quite happy to pay someone to send me the program(disksalv v2) on disk? just pm me about that(or email)

So does using an accelarator and a fix-disk program mess up the hard-drive?And can i use key '2' to disable it on bootup?(like with the blizzard boards?)
Taking it out each time is a real pain!

So far i've lost wingcommander - didn't have achance to try it with my new accelarator

I haven't lost as much as i thought and i know it's on the harddrive somewhere so maybe this situation is recoverable.
If not i guess i gotta check ebay at some point! although it's all the 'serious' software that will be hard to replace - i've got nearly just about most things released before 1995ish(accept disksalv it seems), music/video/graphics/programming - i'll probably never use it all, but it was a nice setup!

I'm trying to free up at least one partition to reformat - i might have to sacrifice alot of data, but i guess that's the best i can hope for. I was having so much fun re-discovering all those great games! Lionheart is a great platformer!
So will Disksalv v2 be any better than QuarterBack 6.1(and Tools)?
cheers


i will make my amiga work again!

21/09/02
EDIT:

OK i've looked around here a bit and printed out a couple of guides(from the FAQ section - doh!) to help me transfer files from PC to amiga so that should be cool.
My amiga has been spending the last 30 hours trying to repair my HD-1: partition(the one i started having problems on first). It was on 98% this morning and showing a screenful of 'cant read disk block 148.000........' etc!
I'll look into getting the latest virus checker and searching for disksalv v2 on aminet.

Anyone tried to setup a harddrive with an amiga and pc partition on the same drive? I've got a 30gig removable drive(slave setup) that i use at work on my pc's - i might try to fit it into the same unit my amiga cd-rom is in and try to run it on both platforms:eek
could be very handy - especially in my current desperate situation.
Can it be done?