Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!cbmvax!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!umd5!mimsy!oddjob!hao!boulder!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!uwmcsd1!marque!gryphon!pnet02!hrlaser
From: hrlaser@pnet02.cts.com (Harv Laser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Hard Drive Grumbling
Message-ID: <2058@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Date: 8 Jan 88 05:20:09 GMT
Sender: root@gryphon.CTS.COM
Organization: People-Net [pnet02], Redondo Beach, CA.
Lines: 73

The hardware: A1000, Starboard2 (2 megs ram), Supra 4x4 interface to
Supra 20 meg hard drive.

The history: A1000 stone reliable, used for over 2 years, no problems.
             Starboard2, a year old, ditto.
             Supra 20 meg, had for 3 weeks, bought used, everything
                 worked like gangbusters for 3 weeks...till today...

The disaster: I'm sitting here merrily shuffling some icons around
 in many windows, doing 'cleanups' and then 'snapshots' to the hard drive.
I've done this hundreds upon hundreds of times with no ill effects... so
I open up a window, shuffle some icons around (I use CLI and Workbench
both, depends on what I'm doing, but I'm no beginner), clean them up,
extended-select them all and the drawer icon they live in, hit snapshot
from the menu, some hard disk grinking (rather than floppy disk gronking)
and alluvasudden, up pops a requester "Error Validating Volume Supradrive,
Key 7553 already set"... and a couple more grinks, and then another one
"Disk Structure Corrupt! Use DISKDOCTOR to repair"  <<<<sigh>>>>

I go back and look at the icons I had been cleaning and shuffling and 
notice that a couple of them had long names and the names were overlapping.
Normally I didn't think this was a problem (the names of two icons
overlapping each other)... the icons themselves weren't overlapping, but
their names were. Anyway, no dice. I reboot 4 or 5 times, and get a
"Can't Validate Volume Supradrive" requester every single time. 
DH0: (my 10 meg partition) doesn't show up on an INFO command (says
"validating"), and as the tears stream down my face, I begin the laborious
process of backing up, reformatting, and restoring. 

Now I suppose this question should go to CATS, but I'll take all answers:
what gives here? Can overlapping icon names cause this disaster to happen?
Is this a known Intuition bug? Is there ANY way short of a hard disk
reformat to get the sucker to validate when that "Key nnnn already set"
requester comes up? 

Parenthetically, some other comments and observations:
- I phoned Supra in Oregon and told all of this to them, and their answer
  was "reformat it and restore your files from your backup..forget about
  Diskdoctor, that'll just make it worse" (he was right, by the way...
  before reformatting, I tried Diskdoctor just for the hell of it...
  it made it worse. It reported a bunch of corrupt files, I got even
  more "Key nnn already set" requesters with some VERY long numbers
  for the "key", and it didn't solve the validation problem
- I used SDBackup to backup all the files (good program although slow)
  but since I had backed up a couple weeks ago, the 'archive bit' on most
  of the files on the hard drive had been set. Well guess what happens
  when a hard drive can't validate? You got it, you can't re-set the
  archive bit, so every single file that I backed up with SDBackup
  popped up another requester that said "Volume Supradrive is not
  Validated!" which I had to ansewr with a mouse click. Figuring a
  backup with a mouse click after every file would take days, since I
  had HUNDREDS of files on DH0:, I got yet another mutated inspiration
  to use Bryce's "cancel" program to cancel all the requesters automatically.

  That worked for a while, and SDBackup merrily did its thing, till it
  hit a file and reported "Volume SupraDrive has a read/write error"...
  well since I didn't get a requester, since 'cancel' was cancelling it,
  everything hung up... the mouse pointer wouldn't move, and I had to
  reboot, thus messing up my backup. 

So the net result is, I now have a reformatted hard drive using the new
Supra harddisk.device, and new Supramount, done with the new SupraFormat
program, and things seem a bit faster and generally more solid... but I
still want to know how I ended up in Dante's Harddrive Inferno to
begin with?  And... has anyone come up with a program that can overcome
the "Key nnnn already set" and "Volume xxx is not Validated" problem
that could possibly save me, or others, in the future should this 
unfortunate occurance happen again?  And what about icons with overlapping
long names? Is this a problem? 


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