"Disk is not validated" error message

[Buleste]

You can either let the HDD run and let WB validate the disk which will take around 10 mins or run disksalv and use that to validate the disk.

[Tiago]

You can either let the HDD run and let WB validate the disk which will take around 10 mins or run disksalv and use that to validate the disk.

disksalv? .... where can i get it? maybe in aminet....
HDD? sorry being so ignorance, (Portugal is in the tail of europe ) but what do you mean with HDD? How WB validate it?

[Demon Cleaner]

Disksalv download

Essential Amiga Utilities

[Tiago]

Disksalv download

Essential Amiga Utilities

Thanks Demon!!

[Buleste]

When i say HDD i mean Hard Disk Drive. Sorry about that. I'm not 100% about the technical details but FFS has a built in safety feature that basically checks the structure of the Hard Disk. A little like scandisk on the PC. Basically the workbech tries to repair the structure. Whilst this is going on the disk is in a read only state.

I know someone will come along and tell me i'm talking crap but thats how i think it works.

[Teho]

If that just happened out of the blue then you might want to check your disks for viruses. There was a particularily nasty virus called the Saddam virus back in the day which spread like wildfire among unprotected disks and broke the disk-validator on them. The disk-validator is in the L drawer on the disk by the way, and one common sign that a virus had destroyed it was that it often got renamed to <<<saddam>>> or something. But not always, it could look normal and still be infected.

I remember this thing making a mess of my floppy collection back then, until I could get hold of a virus scanner and go over my entire collection with it. Which took days. Nasty business.

[Tiago]

Teho:

It could be a virus but look:
I just reboot in winuae with workbench 3.1 in floppy and the amigasys3aga.sys config and i had the usb hd3.5 (empty) so, where is the virus? Amigasys3 witch i download? Workench3.1main.adf?

[Harrison]

I remember that Saddam virus too. Luckily for me I kept all of my floppies write protected unless I needed to write something to them then I would just unprotected them during that time and then switch them back. Also I tended to boot directly from floppies where possible rather than boot to WB first.

But I do remember a couple of the magazines accidentally "included" it on their cover disks, and the following month their next coverdisks carried a virus removal program specifically created for them that repaired the original cover disks.

This raises an interesting question. Amiga Disk preservation projects are looking to preserve disks as original unaltered images. Should they therefore try to preserve the one with the virus still present?