Hardrive Error Codes anyone ? A4000/30

[Ray T. Racer]

Googled & googled , nada . Lots of various info on error code flashes/colours/etc, like a bad acid trip, but nothing specifically related to the hard drive front panlel activity light (not the actual activity lite on the internal hard drive) .

Anyway , poor old IDE drive is spinning noisely as ever, but no boot/no show up on "2 mouse button down" boot & the F-Panel activity light is flashing ...

once & then 2 quick flashes .

Thanks In Advance

[cpiac64]

boot from floppy "install" and verify if view the icona hdd, next use hdtoolbox for read partition and name of hdd

[Daedalus]

The hard drive LED on the 4000 (and most Amigas) is driven directly by the hard drive - the Amiga itself cannot control it. Therefore, the flashing is coming from the drive, and if it's an error code rather than just the drive retrying a read/startup every couple of seconds, then you might find details in the datasheet for that specific hard drive model.

[Ray T. Racer]

Originally Posted by cpiac64

boot from floppy "install" and verify if view the icona hdd, next use hdtoolbox for read partition and name of hdd

OK, good advice . Thanks ! However , this drive is no longer bootable , but maybe I should just give it a rest & see what happens. Been running very hot lately (and noisey!) .

Cheers!

[Ray T. Racer]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

The hard drive LED on the 4000 (and most Amigas) is driven directly by the hard drive - the Amiga itself cannot control it. Therefore, the flashing is coming from the drive, and if it's an error code rather than just the drive retrying a read/startup every couple of seconds, then you might find details in the datasheet for that specific hard drive model.

Ahhh , OK . That make's perfect sense . Micropolis has gone out of business now but perhaps this is an industry standard Error Code (you never know ) .

I'll dig deeper .

Thanks For Your Reply !

[Jope]

Unfortunately there are no general IDE activity LED blink codes. Actually I have never heard of the activity LED being used for this purpose, but of course that doesn't mean it never happened.

[Ray T. Racer]

Originally Posted by Jope

Unfortunately there are no general IDE activity LED blink codes. Actually I have never heard of the activity LED being used for this purpose, but of course that doesn't mean it never happened.

Thanks For Your Reply :

I did some googling, and it seems there are some codes for Dell , but very-very info . One web page mentioned 5 flashes , followed by 3 flashes (etc) describes error code 3.5 or 3:5 , so one could look it up .

I'm guessing it's an older technology ? Maybe ?

Mine is flashing : once ... then twice , over & over . Drive spins , but sputters , then dies , until the next day , then the same again .

[Jope]

The drive is dead. Could be one of many reasons, but HDD data recovery is not really within the scope of teaching from scratch in forum posts.

[Ray T. Racer]

Originally Posted by Jope

The drive is dead. Could be one of many reasons, but HDD data recovery is not really within the scope of teaching from scratch in forum posts.

Of Course :

Crazy idea but ...

Would it not be possible to conceptualize/build a prototype "machine" that is capable of simply accepting disassembled ,dead/damaged hard drive 'platters' (disks) , one at a time , and bit-4-bit reading them, perhaps a dozen or even a hundred per day ?

Before you say "No" , how about considering a Master Machinist who is used to working with sub-micro tolerances (before breakfast & a coffee) .

My dead 2210A has 5 perfect disks and a fried C3AD 800775-06-6 chip that stinks and has burn marks on the white exterior decal surface . Forget about that small change .

I'm talking theoretically .

Could it not be possible to gather all disk bits/bytes , and then reassemble/restore the files in the original operating system using a prototype 'file restoration' software ?

No ?

OK , make it simpler ; gather each disk's data & restore to another Hard Drive for the customers , let them deal with what's there - full working files & some that are not so ... congruent .

Sorry about the crude lingo . Perhaps not creating it properly , but you know what I mean of course .

What are your thoughts ?

Bring the negative thoughts, first, of course .

Cheers
Art T. Lacer

[Jope]

It is possible to create such a thing.

Currently none of the data recovery companies do this. They have donor drives and swap circuit boards and head assemblies around to get the data out. The reason is, every drive is different and it is a lot of slow expensive effort to reverse-engineer the new format every time.

[Ray T. Racer]

Originally Posted by Jope

It is possible to create such a thing.

Currently none of the data recovery companies do this. They have donor drives and swap circuit boards and head assemblies around to get the data out. The reason is, every drive is different and it is a lot of slow expensive effort to reverse-engineer the new format every time.

Thanks :

Hmmm, so ,drive manufacturers' platters are in a sense "encoded" ? Each a kind of proprietary algorithm ?

OK, had no idea . Make's sense , but still surprising to myself, initially anyway .

Oh well , back to the drawing board ...

Once & forever again , "good to know" .

Cheers !

Ralph Tea Eraser .

[Jope]

They are RLL derivatives, but since the raw data is never exposed to the IDE / SCSI bus, they can be just as creative as they like when packing the data to the platters. Could be varying sector counts and so on, the logical geometry you see in your operating system often does not correspond to the physical platters at all.

[Ray T. Racer]

Originally Posted by Jope

They are RLL derivatives, but since the raw data is never exposed to the IDE / SCSI bus, they can be just as creative as they like when packing the data to the platters. Could be varying sector counts and so on, the logical geometry you see in your operating system often does not correspond to the physical platters at all.

Ahhh , Mad Science/Tower of Babel/Justify Our Bullshit Jobs/Ours are 2% faster/better .

At any rate , it's interesting to know the details .

Not unlike the crazy video encoding nonsense we suffered through for decades (wayyy too late & wayyy too many example proprietary video formats to mention) .

Such is life .

(Thanks To You Xmedia ReCoder )
And XnView of course .

Thanks again for the Information .
Ray-Ray Leaf Raker