Re: Repairing corrupted IIgs hardisk?

[Jerry <SNIPawanderin@yahoSNIPo.ca>]

grent@comcast.net wrote:

> On Dec 17, 12:40 am, Mitchell Spector <mitch...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>     Rather annoyed at the moment. Went to cold boot my IIgs
>> tonight after a lock up only to find, mysteriously, the entire hardisk
>> wiped itself out! The RamFAST still detects the SCSI hardisk
>> but it cannot see any of its partitions (it's just a large unpartitioned
>> device now). I only *just* recovered a physical hardisk failure from
>> last year.
>>
>>     I tried using ProSel 16's volume repair utility to try and examine
>> the drive, but it just gives up and reports a cryptic error message:
>>
>> "MLI error #$2F - Error occurred on  block 2 - Program aborted"
>>
>>     Is there any other software worth trying, perhaps something
>> like Universe Master? Thankfully I created backup of all my
>> partitions on Zip disks a few months ago, but that is rather a
>> pain restoring. Just wondering what options I might try to repair
>> the partition map on the drive before reformatting.
>>
>> ...I wonder if this wasn't a result of my ZipGS constantly crashing
>> or the lose/intermittently ADB connector on my keyboard. Was
>> planning to do something about those weeks ago but got
>> sidetracked. :)
>>
>> Mitchell Spector
> 
> Well Deiiverence might be another one. But before you do anything I
> would try cleaning the Ramfast cards edge contacts. Then make sure all
> the chips are seated good by reseating them and try reseating the SCSI
> cable or another one. Oxidation happens over time with all things.
> 
> Take Care

If you can, hook the drive up to another computer and try to read its raw
contents into a file.  I find Linux particularly simple for this task:

  dd if=/dev/sd?? of=my-hd-file

where /dev/sd?? must be adjusted for your setup.

Then you can fiddle around with the hard-disk image with native tools, or
under an Apple II Emulator.  A hex-dump of the image should also reveal
whether or not the whole disk is messed up or if it's just the first few
blocks.

-- 
--  Jerry