Help - Amiga hard drive crash :(

[Angus]

Hi all,
My Amiga 1200 wouldn't boot up last night, and I saw a hard drive error message come up as it tried. This is a 1200 060 Mediator/Voodoo OS3.9 setup. I'm using a little portable TV to display at the moment.

I booted Quarterback tools from floppy, and although DH0: didn't show as a drive any more, it did as a device, and I selected Analyse and Repair from the options. Quarterback found about 10 or 12 error (I selected repair on each) then I got a software error, with a Reboot or Suspend requester - I tried this several times, always with the same result.

I have QB tools and an old version of HDTools on floppy. Although I can see my DH1 partition, there are several other partitions that I can't see, I guess because they are beyond the 4 gig limit. I would like to recover them if possible, as they are mostly not backed up. I have a quarterbacked backup of DH0 on CD, if I could find a way of formatting DH0 and then restoring from the backup, would the extra partitions reappear - does Quarterback save that info?

Or is there something clever I could do with HDTools.

Not too sure on the best way to proceed.

I have another HD with a bootable workbench on it, so possibly I could make that the master and the damaged HD the slave and try to repair it from that vantage point.

Any suggestions, chaps?

[Mad-Matt]

OMG! Dont let QB Tools loose on any modern amiga hd. It knows nothing of advancmemnts in more recent versions of ffs or other foreign file systems. Disksalve is best program in this case (for ffs anyway). Quaterback backup just restores files as I recall. I dont think it knows of the device the files came from. has been very many years since ive used though.

[TheCorfiot]

mmm using OS3.9, This "Can" include ROM & file system updates during Boot loaded from the HD.
Booting from a floppy or other OS version which do not include these updates can cause real problems as the current running OS will then not function correctly with the "Newer" system partitions on the HD which have been created, formatted & maintained by OS3.9 & the "updates" or ROM patches.

TC

[chiark]

best way to proceed would be to take a device level copy of the disk and put it into an image.

You could use linux dd (I think) to dump the disk into a file that you could always restore back to the disk if you get it utterly buggered. It'd give you a safety net.

WinUAE might be able to help, too...

Best of luck. Have a search on here as there's quite a lot of advice regarding this topic.

[zipper]

Read my answer on Amiga.org

[Angus]

Originally Posted by Mad-Matt

OMG! Disksalve is best program in this case (for ffs anyway). Quaterback backup just restores files as I recall. I dont think it knows of the device the files came from. has been very many years since ive used though.

Thanks guys. sorted now - I think. Took me a long time, not helped by the fact that my Mediator/060/1200 expansion board interface is not the most stable thing in the world....

I didn`t have any luck with QB Tools or Disksalv - I managed to get a CD up and running from floppy and then restor a Quarterbacked image on to DH0 - at this point all the other partitions returned.
Hopefully, she is fixed.