cd rom setup on A1200 w dataflyer 1200 scsi

I installed a dataflyer 1200 scsi controller in my A1200 yesterday, along with 3.1 roms and amigaos 3.1. So far, so good. Today, my scsi cdrom drive and external case arrived, and I've set my SCSI ID to 1, terminated the drive (via the jumper on the back of the cdrom itself) and hooked it up. I installed the exp scsi driver, and moved CD0 from Storage/DOSDrivers into DEVS/DOSDrivers. Now, double-clicking CD0 says it's already mounted, but no icon (the cd is an ISO9660 format disk with rockridge extensions that I burned full of random files from my hard disk, as I don't have an amiga with a burner or any amiga cdroms). When I try to cd to cd0: in cli, I get this error message:

CD0
Program failed (error #80000003)
Wait for disk activity to finish.

I'm trying to figure out if (a) I screwed up the setup of the software, (b) the amiga just won't read that format of cdrom, or (c) my cdrom drive is a complete piece of junk that I will have to pay to ship back for a refund.

Any help here would be great; I'm completely stymied. The drive, btw, is a 24x drive out of a mac.

[Matt_H]

This is the Dataflyer that piggybacks off the IDE bus? You can't use SCSI ID 0 or 1. Set it to 2 or higher, then make sure CD0 is using ExpXDS.device and your chosen unit (Icon->Information, if I'm not mistaken).

Yes, that's the one. Thank you - I'm going to try it on another SCSI ID right now.

Okay, I just got my first ever guru meditation screen. I forgot to use the full pathname to the driver! Progress made, though - at least I don't get crashes trying to access the drive now. Thanks!

Hmm. Alright, I'm pretty sure this cd rom drive is no good, or else the Amiga can't read the disc I burned. The system now tells me there's "no disk in drive" when I cd to it. The drive does spin a little (I have the case open so I can see the top of the unit...) back and forth when I insert a disc but, although it has been a while since I did any hardware troubleshooting, I seem to remember that a cdrom should spin up to full speed on insert (or at least access).

Does anyone know what cd formats I can read with the cdfs that comes with 3.1?

[rkauer]

pkillo wrote:
Yes, that's the one. Thank you - I'm going to try it on another SCSI ID right now.

Okay, I just got my first ever guru meditation screen. I forgot to use the full pathname to the driver! Progress made, though - at least I don't get crashes trying to access the drive now. Thanks!

Hmm. Alright, I'm pretty sure this cd rom drive is no good, or else the Amiga can't read the disc I burned. The system now tells me there's "no disk in drive" when I cd to it. The drive does spin a little (I have the case open so I can see the top of the unit...) back and forth when I insert a disc but, although it has been a while since I did any hardware troubleshooting, I seem to remember that a cdrom should spin up to full speed on insert (or at least access).

Does anyone know what cd formats I can read with the cdfs that comes with 3.1?

 1- Your SCSI CD looks odd: all CD units spins for little time to read the contents of a disk. But since you don't have proper drivers to make the CD works, jump to: 2.
 
 2- Download (and install, of course) IDEFIX97.  During the install, it will ask for the CD unit. Let the program search it for you.

 3- Reboot your Amiga and enjoy your attached CD unit. :-D

> Your SCSI CD looks odd: all CD units spins for little time
> to read the contents of a disk.

That's what I thought, but it's been a decade since I was a hardware tech and the old semi-permanent storage is starting to go.

Drivers are good to have. I guess that idefix97 requires the Installer program from the error message I got, so I've put that on too, and I am now looking at a screen that says "Starting AddIDEfixStartup".

Hrmph. OK, it's been a few minutes since the disk activity lights on the amiga lit up at all, and the same screen is up. My mouse isn't frozen, though. So I'll give it a few more minutes, and then I guess I'll be holding down both mouse buttons.

[Matt_H]

You don't need IDEFix. The Dataflyer and the CD drive are both SCSI. There are things in the IDEFix package that might be useful tools (FindDevice, CacheCDFS), but installing the whole package isn't necessary.

It's probably worth using CacheCDFS since the CDFileSystem built into 3.1 is terrible. It's possible that you had everything configured correctly but it just didn't work because the software is bad.

Other things to note: old CD drives tend to have a hard time reading CD-Rs burned at high speeds, and many can't read CD-RWs at all. When testing, try any professionally-mastered CD with data on it in addition to your file disc.

Ok, I've tried the installation three times now. It hangs at the same place every time. Is it possible this has something to do with using the 'demo version' it offers to install since I don't have a key?

edit: I skipped over the installation of idefix itself, and used the scsi bus scanner, which finds nothing at the id of the cdrom drive. so i think it must be the drive.

Update: I got my replacement cd-rom drive today. It works fine (tested it with a Surf Squirrel) and all, but my dataflyer does not recognize anything on the scsi bus, at least as far as the bus scanner that comes with idefix is concerned. At least it doesn't crash the system anymore when I try to list the cd0: directory, though.

I check all the connections and cables in the machine the other day and will do so again (when I get done with work) but they looked fine to me. I'm wondering if the controller itself is no good (I bought it from a fairly difficult seller on ebay ). Anyone know of a good way to determine if it is doa? (the IDE pass-through works, which I thought indicated it was ok, but what do I know...) I'd like to exhaust any possibilities before I decide to ask paypal for my money back, so I might try reinstalling the os on the machine and starting fresh. There's not a lot on there I'd have to reinstall, and there are a slew of drivers that I don't want or need that were installed by idefix.

Any help would be great, thanks.