Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!maytag!aries5!giguere
From: giguere@aries5.waterloo.edu (Eric Giguere)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: It's back.... (was "It crashed...")
Keywords: SCSI, crash, recovery
Message-ID: <161@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Date: 1 May 89 21:38:20 GMT
Sender: daemon@maytag.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: giguere@aries5.waterloo.edu (Eric Giguere)
Distribution: na
Organization: Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo
Lines: 44

Well, if my message yesterday sounded panicky, that's because it was.... having
a hard drive crash on you before you've made any backups is not a fun 
experience.  That said, however, it isn't as bad as I thought it was.  My real
problem was that I had no info on the hard drive itself to set up the mountlist
info -- the dealer had neglected to give that stuff to me.  Anyhow, I called
him up, he was surprised but gave it to me over the phone.  I took a guess at
how big my first partition was (I knew where it started at least) and created
a mountlist entry for it.  It mounted, but there was nothing there... so I
tried DiskDoctor (yes, the one that comes with the OS) and WOW! directories
started appearing like magic!  Some files were corrupted, but they were mostly
printer drivers and fonts, since it turns out the partition was smaller than
I had first guessed.  But the important stuff was intact, including my
mountlist and the startup-sequence.  I was now able to remount all the 
partitions properly... and the data is still there!  I am busy now downloading
all of it to floppies and will do a low-level format to get rid of the bad
blocks.

The main thrust of this message is:  KUDOS to Commodore for DiskDoctor.  That
little beasty did a great job!

Actually, while I'm here:  going over the recovered mountlist, I noticed that
my dealer had set up the first 2 cylinders of the hard drive as RES0:, whereas
the manual says that SCSI drives should have them set up as RES2: -- does this
make a big difference?  I'm trying to think why my drive crashed like it did.

Also, I've lost the autoboot... I have to mount things manually from diskette.
How do I set it up to autoboot again?

This all happened because DME couldn't save a file due to a read/write error...
the requester kept popping up and DME would try to save it again and again and
again... this may have aggravated things.  Is it possible for a program to 
intercept these errors and abort its disk activity?  Maybe a little hack to
DME is in order.

And I'd like recommendations on hard drive backup programs.  I have the source
to Matt's backup program but I haven't downloaded the support library yet. 
Until then I think it's ZOO and COPY time....

Thanks again to all who helped.

Eric Giguere                                  268 Phillip St #CL-46
For the curious: it's French ("jee-gair")     Waterloo, Ontario  N2L 6G9
Bitnet  : GIGUERE at WATCSG                   (519) 746-6565
Internet: giguere@aries5.UWaterloo.ca         "Nothing but urges from HELL!!"