Back up your Hard Drives! You've been warned.

[Amiduffer]

The inevitable has happened to my HD at a bad time.

Its a 2gig SCSI that I got from a guy real cheap along with a whole bag full that he wanted to get out of his apartment.

I had it partitioned in 2, and good thing. All my graphic programs like ImageFX and Imagine3D and DPaint are on HD1:. I was rendering a cool 70 frame animation on Imagine and had let it go all night. Come the morning, as its at frame 69, what do I hear? tack-tack-tack-tack! Oh no! :shocked:

Its rendered %25 of the frame and aint moving. Hit Cancel. Wait while the horrible crackling noise continues for 5 minutes. Of course, what happens, errors!! :bigcry: The entire animation got wiped out! :-o

I try running Quarterback tools, but the partition is seriously f-ed up. Shut down. When I get back tonight, I'll run Haynes disk-salve and see what I can salvage.

Its a good thing, that I found a nice Zipdrive recently and backed up that particular HD partion. whew. But I dread what would have happened had I not done that. So, all you youngsters, pay attention, back up your HD!

[bobamu]

I backup by buying a new larger hd and copying all the stuff onto there, then I get a whole extra bunch of stuff and then that hd is full, so I back that up by buying a new bigger hd and repeat the process :crazy:

One day I'll be very unlucky :-o

tho having said that, I wouldn't have my only copy of anything on a second hand hd generally.

nah, I'll have my only copy of unreplaceable data on an uncased cdr balanced precariously on a pile of books or something :-D

[GreggBz]

To back up my miggy I usually mount the hard drive in Linux and make a big gzipped tarball of it.

Has anyone attempted a bare metal restore from this type of backup? My guess would be to partition the hard drive with hdtoolbox and mount it again, and unzip that tarball onto it.

[A4000_Mad]

Thanks for the warning Amiduffer :-)


In my main A4000 Desktop i boot into an ide 8.4GB hardrive. I also have a 9GB SCSI hard drive sitting on an Oktagon SCSI card. As i create new files i put a copy in both so as to keep them clones of each other. I've recently changed both drives to Perfect File System 3 for added safety as well.

I also love using the Iomega 2GB Jaz drives for backing up and transferring files around. I leave them PC formatted and use 'fat95' in the Amiga for it to read/write to them perfectly. It only takes a few moments to put a copy of Workbench onto a Jaz disk :-)

A4000 Mad

[Amiduffer]

I ran Disk Salv and Quarterback Tools and the prognosis doesn't look good.

Running the repair function in QT gave me this:

"Unable to check for bad blocks because there is not a valid bitmap which is needed to identify and mark bad blocks."

Then, when I opened the HD1: window, I saw that the entire partition is full.

So, what next, format the partition? Toss the HD? What can I use to pull files out of this mess.

Thanks.

[TjLaZer]

A4000mad

I also have a Jaz and get read/write errors lately. I will try the Fat95 and see if that helps. Can you post your mountlist for Fat95 on a Jaz 2GB?

Thanks!

[Tahoe]

GreggBz wrote:
Has anyone attempted a bare metal restore from this type of backup?

Nice way of backing up! I personally use Quarterback and write to a DDS3 tape; works fine also.

As far as BMR goes; Bare Metal Restore means a hardware independent restore of a machine with OS and applications all running. Because of the fantastic way Amiga's work, they usually are BMR by itself. I use a single (be it simple) hd installation i can swap from basically any amiga and boot from it.

Amiga's, unlike windows, do not need drivers. I can restore my A4000T tape to a 3000 drive and it will run. Try restoring a Backup Exec tape from a Compaq Proliant to a Dell Poweredge and you're in for a lot of fun :)

[Chain]

Amiduffer wrote:
I ran Disk Salv and Quarterback Tools and the prognosis doesn't look good.

So, what next, format the partition? Toss the HD? What can I use to pull files out of this mess.

Thanks.

Run disksalv in salvage mode, it will be able to copy readable files to another drive

[Amiduffer]

Chain wrote:

Run disksalv in salvage mode, it will be able to copy readable files to another drive

Ok. I'll give that a go.

[amiga1260]

I have all my stuff backupped on CD's. Every year I check these CD's and make a copy of it.

[bigdan]

I must setup Diavolo Backup (Morphos version) (http://amigazeux.net/diavolo/feat.php) and my scsi DAT since weeks... and i burn CDs and DVDs too ;)

[TiredOLife]

I use a DVD burner and FryingPan.

[A4000_Mad]

@
TjLaZer

"can you post your mountlist for fat95 on a Jaz 2GB"

Of course :-)

My icon is called JAZPC. Note that the Filesystem = L:fat95



/* $VER: JAZPC 1.0 (12.01.02)
*
* This file enables CrossDOS (PC FAT16) on a 2Gb Jaz drive.
*
* You can use 1Gb and 2Gb Disks, no need for separate mountlists!
*/

Surfaces = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 1
Lowcyl = 0
Highcyl = 2091049
BufMemType = 1
Blocksize = 512
Flags = 0x00000000
Maxtransfer = 0x7FFFFFFF
Mask = 0x00FFFFFE
Reserved = 4
Filesystem = L:fat95
Stacksize = 2000
Priority = 5
Bootpri = -20
Globvec = -1
Buffers = 250
Dostype = 0x4d534800

/* The Device and Unit fields are controlled by tooltypes in the JAZPC icon.
*
* Device = oktagon.device
* Unit = 5
*/



Hope that helps?


A4000 Mad

[amiga92570]

I always backup my partitions on CD. Never had to use a backup but I am always cautious, Even on the PC.

[weirdami]

So, what next, format the partition? Toss the HD? What can I use to pull files out of this mess.

You said you had just backed up the data before it all happened, so what files are you trying to get back besides that animation? "tack-tack-tack-tack" = get a new hard drive. Don't bother trying to get the animation off of it. Get a new hard drive, run the render, go to bed, and tomorrow you'll have the animation back. Much easier than trying to get it off a dead hard drive.

[Amiduffer]

Where in the world do you set the settings in Disk Salv in order to salvage the files and put them on another HD? Tooltypes? I've never had to use this program before.

[A4000_Mad]

I've never had to use Disk Salv either. But I once saved a Work partition that had gone 'HD1:NDOS' using QuarterBack Tools. I remember that I chose to restore to a different partition and it worked.

Erm.... In your case this is probably of no help at all :cry:



"Unable to check for bad blocks because there is not a valid bitmap which is needed to identify and mark bad blocks."

EEEK! It was getting annoying reports like this that made me struggle my way through changing to PFS3. I've had no problems since though.

A4000 Mad

[Amiduffer]

A4000_Mad wrote:
"Unable to check for bad blocks because there is not a valid bitmap which is needed to identify and mark bad blocks."

EEEK! It was getting annoying reports like this that made me struggle my way through changing to PFS3. I've had no problems since though.
A4000 Mad

Well, this brings up another question. I've been thinking of changing too, and this seems like a good excuse. My second HD with the HD2: and HD3: partions are formated with FFS. If I put a new HD in with a different format like PFS3, will it conflict with the other HD?

[A4000_Mad]

I can't see any reason for a conflict as I didn't experience any. My 8.4GB ide hard drive was giving those annoying "Invalid volume bitmap" reports. So I bought a 9G SCSI hard drive and put it on the Oktagon SCSI card in my A4000. As i had never dealt with PFS3 before i partitioned the 9GB SCSI drive and formatted it in FFS. Then I copied the contents of the ide drive into the SCSI drive. Then i used HDToolBox to add PFS3 to the ide drive, reformatted it in PFS3 and copied all my stuff back. Lastly i changed the SCSI drive to PFS3 as well. It was a bit of job for two drives with 6 partitions each ! !

Note:- You need somewhere to put your data while you PFS3 format each partition. For Workbench i made another partition bootable and copied it to that. If I recall correctly you need to do a reboot after adding PFS3 and formatting, so always keep a partition bootable :eek:

A4000 Mad

[Hammer]

Try restoring a Backup Exec tape from a Compaq Proliant to a Dell Poweredge and you're in for a lot of fun :)


For Wintel world, use basic redundancy techniques such as RAID 1 or hard disk cloning software such as Acronis's True Image Workstation**.

I was able to easily restore my hard drive image via USB2.0 external hard disk and Acronis's True Image Workstation.

**My X64 laptop doesn’t have SATA RAID features.

I also use SpeedFan 4.31 for obtaining hard drive's S.M.A.R.T information e.g. includes hard disk’s fitness rating.

[Amiduffer]

Well. I "bit the bullet" last night and just did a simple format of HD1:, and then tried to run everything I could think of to test the condition of the disk. It seemed in ok shape, so I just restored everything off the ZIP disk and VIOLA! everything is back to normal. Although I lost about a weeks worth of "work" on my 3D project and a few pictures. :oops:

So, something happened that night while I was asleep to jolt the bitmap out of whack. Maybe a slight loss of power?

Now, I've run into another weird thing. While using Quarterback Tools, it can see the Zip drive with no problem. But nothing else can find it. :-? Everything seems ok with termination and all. Using ZJtools (off aminet) can't even find it? The tooltypes seem to have the correct settings. How weird. :-?