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From: rchampe@hubcap.UUCP (Richard Champeaux)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: possible preferences bug
Message-ID: <629@hubcap.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Nov-87 14:53:44 EST
Article-I.D.: hubcap.629
Posted: Fri Nov  6 14:53:44 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Nov-87 16:28:31 EST
References: <310@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Organization: Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Lines: 38
Keywords: HD crash
Summary: HD crash may not be preferences' fault

In article <310@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>, jwz@SPICE.CS.CMU.EDU (Jamie Zawinski) writes:
> 
> This happened a while ago, so my memory of it may be a little faulty, but...
> 
> I had just gotten a Xebec 20meg hard disk a few days before, and was in the
> process of moving all of my files on to it.  My logical names were set like
> this from my boot floppy:
> 
>   SYS:    DH0:System/
>   C:      DH0:System/C/
>   S:      DH0:System/S/
>   etc...
> 
> So one day I ran preferences, and saved it, not remembering that it was
> writing the info to the hard disk instead of the floppy where it was needed.
> Well, nothing seemed to be wrong then.  But when I rebooted, at bootup it
> told me that volume DH0: could not be validated.
> 
     This used to happen to me a lot with my supradrive but it turned out
to be my fault.  With floppies, I got into the habit of waiting for the
red light to go out before rebooting.  This doesn't work with hard drives.
About two seconds after finishing writing to a disk, AmigaDos validates the
disk.  Since the motor of the floppy drives is still on durring this two
second pause, the light stays on.  On a hard disk, however, the motor is
always on so the LED is on only durring acceses.  What was happening to me
is that when AmigaDos finished saving the file, the LED would go off.  Then,
two seconds later, it would flicker again while it was validating the disk.
Since I was used to floppies, when the light turned off the first time, I
would reboot or turn off the computer, and the disk was never validated.
     The supradrive can recover from this however, but it takes about 30
seconds of making strange noises.  The first time this happened to me, it
scared the hell out of me, because it didn't tell me what it was doing and 
I thought my drive was broken.

moral: Wait for the second flicker

Rich Champeaux
Clemson University