wdg@ecsvax.UUCP (William Douglas Gullett) (06/21/89)
My brother and I both have AMIGA 1000s. His is 512, 2 drive, vanilla system. He has three almost new games that have died. The error says that the disk is invalid for each one. He swears that he always waits for the light to go off before turning the machine off (except for "Test Drive", it hung and the drive light stayed on continuously for a long period of time, so he turned the machine off). The other two seemed to be "BAD" for no apparent reason. They supposedly ran fine one day and and had the problem the next. Is there some way to fix them? I don't think that he has a VIRUS that is messing up the boot blocks because he loads these games from a COLD machine each time (can you say take over the machine??). Are games copy protected in such a way that they are easily corrupted? Three games bad in a very short time seems to be a little strange to me. thanks in advance, Doug Gullett
FelineGrace@cup.portal.com (Dana B Bourgeois) (06/22/89)
William Gullet writes: (from memory so forgive me) * My brother lost three games. I don't think he has a virus because * he cold boots each time. I know it is obvious but perhaps the Workbench disk is infected. I suggest you write protect your originals, boot, and then make new copies of kickstart and workbench. Then get ahold of a good virus check program and go through your disks. Also you can try doing a hex dump of the boot block and checking it against the C/A boot block. A boot block virus will have extra code before the jump. It may also jump to a different address. Dana
Classic_-_Concepts@cup.portal.com (11/06/89)
Re: bad games disks (from cold start) I don't know how well you know your computers yet, but you should be aware that you should not write high scores or set preferences directly on copy protected disks. This is particularly true for EA disks. Sometimes you can get away with it, but as often as not, you'll end up with problems. If you run from your own Workbench, setting prefs is fine, but some of these games are self-booting. Get yourself a copy tool (not for pirating, but for archiving and creating working disks). Copy your disks as soon as you get them and use the copied disk, never the original. You should do this with ALL your software. Hope you find a solution to your problems. Julie