| I recently bought 20 disks from a store in Northboro MA on Rt 20. They were sold
as DS/DD disks and weren't cheap at $22/10 but not too much out of line either.
Problem is that they are unmarked as to brand, etc. Now I find that copies of
the workbench etc made on these disks take forever to boot. Could this be a
problem with the disks, and if so, should I return them to the store and
complain?
Dave
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| Re: .3
Are the disks completely full (i.e., zero free blocks)? The INFO CLI
command or info Workbench menu item will tell you how many free blocks
are left on a disk.
AmigaDOS has a rather strange feature. Normally, as part of the system
overhead of storing files on a disk, AmigaDOS keeps a bitmap of what
blocks are free on the disk. However, AmigaDOS will allow you to write
so much data to the disk that it doesn't have room to write out the bitmap.
The next time the full disk is mounted, AmigaDOS will notice that the disk
lacks a valid bit map, and compute a new one by inspecting very block on
the drive. This process is called "validation." The most normal
cause of AmigaDOS needing to revalidate a disk is that the disk doesn't
contain a valid bitmap because of some hardware error, software error
(like a system crash in the middle of disk I/O), or operator error (like
pulling the disk out of the drive while AmigaDOS is writing to it and
refusing to put it back).
Since every block must be inspected, validating a floppy takes two or
three minutes. Validating a 20 meg hard disk partition can take a
half hour!
A variation of this problem is that if for some reason your disk has
an invalid bitmap and you have the disk write protected, AmigaDOS
can never correct the problem by writing a valid bitmap to the
disk. Thus, the system will revalidate the disk every time you
insert it into a drive.
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