Re: Block 2 hard drive damage

[crownmi@zot.io.org (Myles Fudge)]

In article <4qabeb$rc@crcnis3.unl.edu>,
Greg Berigan <gberigan@cse.unl.edu> wrote:
>Myles.Fudge@logicbbs.org wrote:
>
>>My difficulty with an IBM OEM-31080 hard drive seem to have no end in sight.
>>Last night the drive suffered damage to block 2 and will not boot.
> {snip}
>Because I've had so many disk failures of block 2, I now always store my
>files in subdirectories so that when block 2 fails, I can copy the whole
>disk to another disk and restore block 2 from another disk created in
>the same way.

Smart idea.  It would be an inconvenience, however not as much as losing 
thousands of files.

>I suspect you have physical damage to the location on the disk
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Oh, god... don't say that!

>corresponding to block 2.  I recommend you find a company that does hard
>drive repair and recovery and MAKE SURE they know what an Apple II is
>and what ProDOS is; they might assume the disk is formatted Macintosh
>and do more damage than recovery.  Impress upon them that it is not a
>Macintosh formatted hard drive.

I've checked that out... about $1 per meg.  Yeah.. $1000 ... no problem!
And they don't have a clue about the ProDOS file structure (this drive 
had 21 P8 partitions, 4 HFS partitions).

>>I want to recover the thousands of files I have on that drive big time!
>
>Try making a disk copy of the entire disk at block level (rather than
>file level) before trying to reformat it!  Try booting to ProDOS 8 from
>a 3.5" disk, but not to GS/OS, and try using a ProDOS 8 application like
>Copy II Plus to make a disk copy (not by file) of the partitions to
>same-sized ZIP disks or a friend's 32 MB or large harddrive.

Larry Beam suggested the same... ProDOS 8 doesn't poll the drive, so it 
just might work.  So I tried it a couple days ago... didn't work.  For 
whatever reason, while ProDOS 8 was booting, the hard drive was polled
(or it seemed so... the LED began flashing at the same time during the 
boot process).

>I still recommend you have the disk looked at by a professional.  They
>can recover files from disks damaged by fire; a head crash should be a
>simple recovery.

Agreed.  Shall we start a fund?   :)

>Is it still under warranty?  The manufacturer may
>require a specific recovery team, perhaps even their own, to qualify for
>replacement of the drive.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

-- 
Myles
crownmi@io.org