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From: Ritzert@DMZRZU71.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Subject: Sooner or later it _will_ happen to you.
Message-ID: <900305132338.807867@DMZRZU71-UNI-MAINZ--GERMANY>
Date: 5 Mar 90 13:23:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 27

<Over the weekend I managed to completely blow away my hard drive.  It wouldn't
<boot, it wouldn't talk to my ST at all, even when I ran AHDI from floppy.
<
<Wouldn't do _nuthin'_.
<
<c60 meg, gone, all gone.
<
<Would you beleive that this has a happy ending?  I had just made

Well, it looks like the drive "felt formatted". This happens sometimes;
I know several people who have had these problems. It also happened to
me with the sh205 a few weeks ago. After I had reformatted the drive (of
course!), someone who has faced this problem several times told me of a
way to restore the drive, at least the partitions above c:\. He told me
that usually only the first 8-10 kB were zeroed. So it was possible to
reconstruct the later partitions with a hd-sector-editor like Supra's
supedit.prg. Of course You have to know about the physical structure on
the disk. So it is recommendable to use such a tool to extract the
formatting and partitioning information, write it onto a sheet of paper
and attach that to the case of You drive.

Does anyone (eventually Atari engineers?) know about the reason for this
problem? Even the people mentioned above --- all very experienced, doing
hardware development for the ST and other computers --- had no idea.

Michael Ritzert
mjr@dmzrzu71.bitnet