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From: tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Help! My disk won't validate.
Message-ID: <11260004@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 28 Mar 91 19:48:57 GMT
References: <23243@as0c.sei.cmu.edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 25

jol@sei.cmu.edu (DR. J) writes:

>saying "Error Validating disk, Key 38 already set".  I can read off the
>disk but every time I try to write or delete a file, I get the system
>requester telling me that disk is not validated.  I tried to use a
>program called validate but it didn't work.  What can I do to validate
>this disk?  It's a Quantum 80.  I hope there is a better solution than
>backing up the whole disk then reformatting then restoring the files.
>I really can't afford the time to do that right now.  
>Does anyone have a better solution?

If your 'validate' program is same as the one I have, it simply forces
the OS to try a validation.  It won't validate if the disk is corrupt.
You need to run something like disksalv on it, I believe.  I recently
went through a similar thing:  I did a full backup, then tried an
Amiga format of the disk; that didn't solve my problems, so I did a
hard format (media initialization), then an Amiga format, then restored
files.  Yep, it took a while (probably 3 hours total, 65 meg drive).
But it was worth it:  I was getting occasional soft read errors before,
and now it's been completely 'clean' for over a month.

I don't mean to be discouraging; certainly in my case I was worried
sick (well, almost) that I'd loose files and maybe have to buy a new
disk.  It didn't take all that long when I decided to bite the bullet
and do it, and as far as I know, I didn't loose a thing.