A1200 FastATA MkV problems

[RTID75]

Got a replacement A1200 motherboard from Amiga Passion with the FastATA MkV I couldn't previously get working ( https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=74396.0 ) fitted and working. Sadly, I've still got issues. 

Spent several hours yesterday putting it into the tower, plugging my hard drive, CDRW and/or DVDRW drives,  Blizzard PPC & BVision back in to it and trying to get it all working.

Before things went wrong last time, I partitioned and set up a mid 2000s 160Gb hard drive I had laying around, as my original late 90s one is very noisy compared to anything remotely modern.

Plugged in on its own, it boots perfectly. As soon as I try to add an optical drive to either port there's problems. In short, the hard drive light stays on, it takes quite a while to start booting and doesn't recognise the optical drive is there.

If I plug my 90s hard drive back in, boot with no startup sequence and run ATAPrefs from the CLI it spots the optical drive, but oddly if I try to boot the machine it 'gurus' as soon as it starts running the startup sequence.

There must be some kind of incompatibility issue with my newer hard drive and the optical drive/s, but I can't for the life of my figure out why it won't boot from my old HDD without immediately crashing.

I've checked and re-checked master / slave jumpers and everything seems to check out.

I'm tempted to plug my old Mk1 FastEIDE back in to see if things work on that, as I can't think of any reason why the MkV shouldn't work as it should.

Does anyone have any ideas or know if anything obvious before I email Elbox?

[marko444]

Hi, have you tried the latest fastata drivers. I upgraded to 3.1.4 and had a similar issue till I found updated drivers from Amigakit.

[paul1981]

I've only ever used my Mk.III with a single 2.5" drive, so I'm not much help here unfortunately. Mine has ata3.driver which has to be run first before running the ATA3Prefs (if I run the ATA3Prefs without the driver, the 'USE' button is greyed out). Of course though, that makes perfect sense as without the driver running it is seen only as a standard A1200 IDE port.

[RTID75]

I'm running the drivers that came on floppy with it brand new only a few weeks ago, so I'd hope they're up to date.

Ironically, the fact I have no CD drive access means I couldn't get files from download on my PC onto the Amiga at the moment anyway! 

I'll try running the driver first and see if that makes any difference.

[paul1981]

On mine, as per instructions, the ata3.driver needs to be run before anything else except in the case where your Amiga will do a reboot first before booting (such as using LoadModule without the REBOOT option for example, or MuMove4K for another example).

Mine does this on my 3.1 setup: (for OS3.9 it may be a bit different, but the included docs on the driver disk should explain exactly where it should go)

[TOP OF STARTUP-SEQUENCE HERE]
MuMove4K PREPAREEMUL 1200
C:ATA3.driver QUIET
C:SetPatch QUIET
[ETC ETC...]

You only need to run the ATA3Prefs program in the Prefs drawer when you change your drive(s) configuration from what it was previously - and then click save so it always uses those settings when ata3.driver is run.

[giZmo350]

If the HDD won't boot with the FastATA, what happens (with the FastATA installed) if you hold down the left mouse button at startup?

Sometimes the PIO setting is out of range for your hardware and will refuse to boot until you set it to something low like 3.

[RTID75]

It's been a while.

I'm delighted to say that we're up and running. Steve at Amiga Passion must have the magic touch.

Spent a few hours rebuilding yesterday. All good.

Before:

[RTID75]

After:

[RTID75]

Now I need to replace my hard drive with something more modern and quieter, or ditch it for a CF set up.

[RTID75]

Noticed I posted my last posts in the wrong thread. Oops!

Anyway, I've had awful luck trying to get this machine running again. Not long after I posted the above pictures the motherboard fell out with the FastATA - again!

Long story short, bought another motherboard and have just finished putting it all back together again.

The problem from this thread (FastATA not getting on with my 160gb hard drive) has been resolved. Found out that I have to hold the left mouse button on first power up to get the ATAPrefs screen up, click save or use and then it boots fine and continues to after a reset.  If I don't then it goes into an endless guru/reset loop without even trying to read the hard drive. No idea why, but now the hard drive and DVD drive are getting on famously!

I've even got FryingPan working and can back up my hard drive to DVD-RW.