Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!unido!ecrcvax!micha
From: micha@ecrcvax.UUCP (Micha Meier)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Hard Disk Problems
Message-ID: <649@ecrcvax.UUCP>
Date: 2 Nov 88 11:48:01 GMT
Reply-To: micha@ecrcvax.UUCP (Micha Meier)
Organization: ECRC, Munich 81, West Germany
Lines: 63

I've experienced recently some problems which are most probably related
to my hard disk. I've been porting a large program to the Amiga
in the past few weeks. When I've fixed the compilation errors,
I've recompiled the whole thing and got gurus which seemed to be
random, that is, when I got it on one file, it was there all the time,
but after a slight change it disappeared or vice versa, it appeared
on a file which was ok before. The guru type varies, sometimes
it's freeing a memory twice, sometimes illegal instruction or key already
free/used.
Although it is still possible that a bug in the compiler is involved,
I suspect that there is as well a problem with the hard disk. Therefore
I (desperately) need the answer to the following questions:

	- is it normal that my hard disk won't validate after a guru?
	  Why does this happen? Sometimes it's validated after a reboot,
	  sometimes not; sometimes it is possible to write to
	  a non-validated disk and sometimes not. Meanwhile I've changed
	  my t: setting to ram: and didn-t get any validation
	  problems since then, but I haven't tried it many times.
	  Is it possible that the validation problem is only due to t: ?

	- I got a guru when trying to delete a .o file of zero length
	  created by the compiler before it crashed. Does it mean that
	  there is a hard/soft error on the disk? The PD programs I know
	  of are able to restore files but not to repair the disk
	  itself - is there a program somewhere that would do this?

	- Since I have no other programs, I've tried diskdoctor
	  to repair the hard disk. It ended up by saying that two
	  keys are not readable. What is the key? How is it related
	  to the cylinder/head? When I've run diskdoctor for the second
	  time, it wrote the same message. I suppose therefore that
	  it does not try to correct the disk or that it did not succeed.

	- Is there a way to tell Amiga that there are some errors on the
	  hard disk without running the hard format? When I've tried to
	  reformat the disk with dpformat (I'm using a PC disk, ST-157R),
	  nothing really changed.

	- Even with the complete format, I cannot tell the controller
	  that there are some bad tracks on the disk since it asks
	  for the BFI number. Can someone tell me what BFI is (I know
	  what it stands for but this does not help me) and how to
	  work it out?

	- If I'm wrong and there is no hard error on the disk (after all,
	  I've reformatted it several times and run some PC tests on it),
	  what can be the problem? If it is only in the compiler, is it
	  possible to prevent it from messing up the disk when it crashes?
	  I somehow cannot make the ROM-wack work, when I
	  loadWB with -debug and select the Debug menu, it just does nothing,
	  is there something I'm missing?


Thanks for any hints/comments.

--Micha


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