Amiga 600 hard disk problem.

[Zombie13]

Hi there!

I've recently bought another two Amigas, an A1200 and a stock A600. The hard disk I bought for the A1200 off eBay was pre-installed, so I've had no problems with that. To save a few quid, I bought a said-to-be-tested 3.2GB IBM-formatted hard disk for the A600 off eBay.

I installed the hard disk into the A600, and the Amiga carried on as normal but didn't display any icons in Workbench. I think this is  normal as the drive was still partitioned/formatted for an IBM PC compatible.

The problem appeared when I tried to prep the hard disk with Workbench 2.05. Everything went smoothly, although I wasn't asked for partition sizes or anything. The prep program told me that it needed to reboot in order to format the drive (I think that was close to the exact message, it was a few days ago now).

After trying the reboot, whenever I switch on the A600 it just displays a black screen. The Floppy and Hard Disk lights do flash though, as if looking for something to boot. If I reset/reboot and hold now the two mouse buttons, I can disable the hard disk partitions "Work_2.x" and "Work". The A600 will then display "No disk present in DF0:". If I pop a disk in, it will boot fine.

I've also just bought the Kickstart 3.1 ROM for the A600, thinking that it was an issue with the size of the hard disk being used with Kickstart 2.05.

Any ideas?

 :-?

[doctorq]

Have you tried booting your Workbench 2.05 disk? When Workbench has loaded you should see two new icons on the desktop.

The Amiga can not boot Workbench from the harddrive before the harddrive has been prepped, formatted and data copied to the disk. You have succeded the first step, but you need the final two...

[Zombie13]

Hi, thanks for the reply!

Sorry, I should have made it clearer... the A600 won't boot anything at all unless I disable the hard drive in the boot menu.

There are only the normal two icons (Workbench & RAM Disk) when I get to boot the Workbench 2.05 floppies (after disabling the hard disk)...

[amigakit]

This is a strange problem.  You would only get this type of problem normally if the filesystem was unrecongnised or the hard disk wasn't prepped properly.

If you dont get a resolutions on this, send us the hard drive and your Workbench disks we can prep, install & test the hard disk and then despatch back to you.

[Zombie13]

Hi amigakit! It was you that I bought the 3.1 ROM from a couple of days ago. I'm certain it's a prepping error, but I'd like to sort this on-hand with help. Being an IT engineer, I do like to find the solution instead of the "easy fix"... but we'll see...

 :-)

[amigakit]

Hey no problem!

We would diagnose the problem by using a USB->IDE convertor plugged into an A1200T with USB ports.

This would mount the hard disk on the Workbench and allow checking of the hard disk by HDToolbox

Have you tried going into early start up and selecting DF0 in the boot meny (as the boot device), then boot into Workbench and run HDToolbox.

[Daedalus]

Hmmm... This is kinda along thelines of what I was thinking... If you've prepped the drive, it will show up as a partition even if it's not formatted, and I'm thinking it has been set with a higher boot priority than the floppy (5 IIRC). This will cause the symptoms you're seeing, as when the Amiga tries to boot from what it thinks is a boot partition and then can't, it gives you an error like that instead of trying the next device in the boot list.

Just a thought anyway, how you would get around it is to choose DF0: specifically in the early startup options.

[Zombie13]

The defaults on the A600 in the boot menu are...

Boot device list...
DF0 (Highlighted)
CC0
WB_2.x


Control Active Devices...
Enabled - DF0      priority 5        ADOS     trackdisk-0
Enabled - CC0      priority 3        ADOS     carddisk-0
Enabled - WB_2.x   priority 1        ADOS     scsi-0
Enabled - Work     not bootable      ADOS     scsi-0

I can't boot Workbench from a floppy unless I disable both hard disk (scsi-0) devices. If I don't disable them, the screen remains black at power-on/reset. When I put the Workbench floppy disk in the drive, it begins to boot for a few seconds, then the hard drive light flashes a couple of times, then all disk activity stops. The screen is still black at this point.

Amigakit, I think I might have to send you the drive if I have no luck. How much do you charge? I thought about connecting the hard drive to my PC, and maybe re-partioning it as an IBM compatible drive and starting again. Or maybe I could prep the disk using Linux fdisk?

Cheers for the replies.

[amigakit]

£14.99 + P&P back to you. Don't forget your AmigaOS disks.

However before you send it, have you tried highlighting DF0: and selecting boot from this drive?

[Zombie13]

Yep, "DF0" is highlighted by default, but still no joy. Do you think I'd have any luck connecting the drive to an IBM compatible PC and using WinUAE or maybe even Linux to set up the drive? I've read that WinUAE can use a real Amiga hard disk if connected to the PC.

Failing that, I'll have to send you the disk drive. I don't have the original Workbench disks, as I bought the Amigas off eBay. Are my backups OK to send you?

Cheers!

[amigakit]

Unfortunately, legally I cannot install AmigaOS onto a hard disk without the originals - the software is still copyrighted.

The WinUAE method should work though.