Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utcsri!me!radio!cks
From: cks@radio.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Hard Drive Grumbling
Message-ID: <934@radio.toronto.edu>
Date: 24 Jan 88 04:28:01 GMT
Article-I.D.: radio.934
Posted: Sat Jan 23 23:28:01 1988
References: <2058@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Reply-To: cks@radio.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann)
Organization: Newsaholics Anonymous
Lines: 69

In article <2058@gryphon.CTS.COM> hrlaser@pnet02.cts.com (Harv Laser) writes:
...
>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? 

 You can use the various disk editors floating around to repair the
damage, if you can find the two (or more) places that are trying to
use 'Key nnnn' (which is really disk block nnnn; I don't know why
AmigaDOS calls them keys here). Doing this is hampered by a lack of
tools to find out who's trying to use that key; the disk validator
knows, but won't tell you, and I don't know of any other tools that
will. What I did when this happened to me was to figure out which file
the disk block really belong to, copy the file to floppy, and delete
it by zapping the directory with the disk editor (thank god, the file
a block belongs to can be determined from the block itself most of the
time).

>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

 At least in my case, it also made various important bits of the hard
drive disappear into oblivion (I managed to rescue some of them with a
disk editor, but others disappeared for good).

>- 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 answer 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.

 What I did the second time this happened was to use a disk editor to
mark the disk valid; then SDBackup could write those archive bits (I
used this ability later on).

>  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. 

 The first time around, I had the same problem you had; what I did was
to go through all the files on the HD with tar, deleting the ones it
couldn't read. This worked OK, but was very time consuming (20M HD,
unpartitioned, making a tar archive in NIL:). The second time around I
got smart. I first marked the disk as validated, then went through
with SDBackup marking things as unbacked-up, then used SDBackup to
back stuff up. Because SDBackup could now mark what files it had
backed up, I could recover fairly fast from a bad file cropping up. I
could also leave the machine unattended to do the backup; when I came
back to find it crashed, I could just use -V to find out what file it
had been trying to back up and zap that file.

-- 
	"I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world."
			Number Ten Ox, "Bridge of Birds"
Chris Siebenmann		{allegra,mnetor,decvax,pyramid}!utgpu!radio!cks
cks@radio.toronto.edu	     or	...!utgpu!{chp!hak!ziebmef,ontmoh}!cks