[comp.sys.amiga] flakier amigas

dleigh@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Darren Leigh) (03/05/89)

True to form, as soon as I found a workaround for my last flakey
problem, another one appeared.  This continues my "never a working
machine" syndrome.  I guess I break computers just by being around
them.

I pulled the 2 Meg board out of my machine and it no longer randomly
gurus.  Suggested diagnoses were either a bad RAM chip or a bad power
supply causing weird memory errors.  I tried a memtest program with no
result, so this and other symptoms lead me to belive that it is a bad
power supply.

Now I have a hard disk error.  I have a 2090A and a Quantum 80 Meg
SCSI drive with a one cylinder OFS partition and the rest as a FFS
partition.  At boot-time, when the FFS partition (named "hr") gets
mounted, I get a requestor saying "Volume hr has a read/write error".
When I press cancel, I get another requestor: "Error validating disk
Key 65536 bad header type".  After pressing cancel on this, things
seem to work normally except I can't write anything onto this partion.

I tried "diskdoctor hr:" only to get a "Not enough memory" error
message (with and without the 2 Meg board installed).  I get the same
message when I do a diskdoctor on "boot:" (my tiny OFS partition) so
apparently diskdoctor wants a look at the whole disk.  Is there some
program out there that will fix my disk, or am I going to have to
reformat it?  Also, is there a disk park utility that I can use?  If
not, how would I go about writing one?

========
Darren Leigh
Internet:  dleigh@hplabs.hp.com
UUCP:      hplabs!dleigh
Ghostscript status:  working on the 1.2 sources, expect an alpha
version ASAMMF (As Soon As My Machine's Fixed)

andy@cbmvax.UUCP (Andy Finkel) (03/08/89)

In article <3011@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> dleigh@hplabsz.UUCP (Darren Leigh) writes:
>I tried "diskdoctor hr:" only to get a "Not enough memory" error
>message (with and without the 2 Meg board installed).  I get the same
>message when I do a diskdoctor on "boot:" (my tiny OFS partition) so
>apparently diskdoctor wants a look at the whole disk.  Is there some

Well, DiskDoctor 1.3.4 is getting a track buffer in chip ram,
rather than using bufmemtype (I'll have this fixed).  But that's
probably not the problem, since you should have more than enough
chip ram for a quantum.  DiskDoctor uses 2 arrays, each 1 longword
per block of drive.  With your 2 meg card you should have
enough for that as well. (unless your memory is fragmented;
use avail to check)  The problem is probably you are
asking DiskDoctor to run on a volume node, instead of a
device node, like running it on SYS: instead of DF0: .  DiskDoctor
is giving an incorrect error message.
-- 
andy finkel		{uunet|rutgers|amiga}!cbmvax!andy
Commodore-Amiga, Inc.

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