ceej@pawl.rpi.edu (Chris J Hillery) (08/17/90)
I REALLY need someone to tell me what to do here... I just diskdoctored my hard drive. Naturally it told me I had a few corrupt files which weren't, and replaced most recently deleted files (which is what I was doing it for, actually). It also gave me a fairly good number of "Block xxxx of file yyy is used twice"s and a few "Key zzzz unreadable"s. However, it survived and exited fine, and no files were missing (that I know of) (except the corrupt ones I told it to delete). BUT!! Soon after that, before it stopped grinding the drive, I got an "Error validating disk: Key 44538 already set". (I'm not sure about the number, but you get the idea.) I had to cancel it. Now my hard drive is stuck permanently in "Validating", according to INFO. The catch is, since my hard drive is not validated, I can't change anything on it! I can do directories and read file fine, but I can't alter, delete, move, rename, or do anything to any file. If I reboot, half-way through the bootup it gives me that same requestor, "Key already set". It continues bootup fine, if I cancel it, but I'm still in perma-validating mode. This has happened once or twice before with diskdoctor (I'm gonna stop using it.... geez), and both times I had to back up the drive and reformat. However, I'd REALLY like to avoid that this time as my hard drive is 96% full and would take 50 diskettes to back up (not to mention a good hour and a half both ways). I Don't HAVE 50 blanks laying around (and would have to really hatchet to make that many). So, my question is, obviously, how do I unset or whatever that key and tell my hard drive that it IS validated? What the heck does "Key already set" mean? What happened?? (OK, so it's more than one question.) If it matters, I'm running a Seagate ST-138 hard drive with an OMTI RLL controller, giving me 47 Megs formatted. I'm using a PaloMax interface. However, I don't THINK the hardware is at fault here. I do get the distinct impression that if I can somehow fix the Already Set key, there's gonna be another key that needs unsetting, so if anyone has a utility or some routine to fix this generically they would earn my eternal gratitude! (Also, if you have a soution, please tell me if its "safe"; ie, whether it's a kludge to get around this problem or it's actually fixing it.) If I can't get this salvaged in the next week, max, I'm gonna have to grit my teeth and back it all up and reformat (which, if you don't know, is a major pain with the Palomax...sigh...), so PLEASE, if you have ANY ideas, PLEASE let me know!! Thank you all in advance!! PS: Email responses would be most appropriate, naturally. I'll summarize and report back here. But if you can only post or whatever for some reason, trust me, I'll be reading here too! So please respond some way! -- //..is|While 1 DO|Erin,Erin,where are|Art of Noise space| -- Ceej (= \X/there| Fork; |you? /-----------.-^------------------|ceej@pawl.rpi.edu AMIGAany|----------^-----|Cebhq gb or|Reclaimer:Hey!That's| gmry@mts.rpi.edu (=other?|HOW DO YOU FEEL.|Yvoreny! (=|mine! Bring it back!|aka Chris Hillery