How do I make an already-installed Amiga hard drive bootable?

[garyg]

I have two SCSI hard drives in my OS 3.9 A4000D

The boot partition (Workbench) is on a 38-year-old (!) Seagate HD.

Since it could fail at any time I'd like to make the cloned Workbench
partition on my 2 Gb HD that's in the machine bootable. Presently, it's not.

I thought I could just change something in its icon but "bootable" isn't an option there.

The Early Startup Screen doesn't show it as bootable, and thus it can't be changed to become bootable.

So it looks like I'll have to use a HDTookbox (I've got the original plus a Cyberstorm HD Toolbox) to
change the boot status. Can someone walk me through this so I don't erase something?

Regards,
Gary

[Matt_H]

It's pretty straightforward. Open HDToolbox. Highlight the drive and click the button that says Edit Partitions (or such). Click on your new/backup boot partition. Click the Bootable checkbox. Make sure the boot priority is lower than your main drive; -1 is probably a safe bet. Click OK. Click Save. Done!

If you accidentally adjusted something that will result in data loss, HDToolbox will warn you when you click OK/Save and give you a chance to abort.

[pVC]

The Bootable flag (and Buffers at least) are things that you can change without losing partition contents. But if you are doing it for the first time for the drive and you're worried about it, you could always make a backup of RDB or write down the exact partition information (start and end positions of partitions, used blocksize and filesystem) somewhere. Then it's easier to recover it if something goes wrong.

[garyg]

Unfortunately, HDToolbox reports is cannot do anything with the drive, apparently
because it's connected to the CyberSCSI controller.

The latter doesn't offer an option to make it bootable. The website will not allow
me to upload a good-quality image

Regards,
Gary

[kolla]

Unfortunately, HDToolbox reports is cannot do anything with the drive, apparently
because it's connected to the CyberSCSI controller.

Really? What does it say?

[garyg]

When I click on the drive a pop-up says "Sorry, this type of device cannot be handled by HDToolbox".

I took pictures of responses when I tried to use HDToolBox and HDToolBox_Cyberstorm_II and
uploaded them in my response, but they were erased by the website and rejected when I downsized
the images and tried again.

[Matt_H]

Strange. That sort of message should only appear if you click on a CD drive or a tape drive or some other non-hard-drive device. What else is on your SCSI bus? Are you sure you clicked the correct device? Is your device a Zip or Jaz other removable drive?

Can you share your tooltypes for HDToolbox?

[garyg]

For now I can tell you that my original 730 MB Seagate SCSI Lightning drive is
on the bus. I'll try to attach an image, but don't know if the website will allow it

[Matt_H]

The image came through. I see a Quantum 700MB drive at unit 0 and an unknown device at unit 6. Unit 0 is the ancient drive and unit 6 is the newer 2GB one? I.e., unit 6 is not a CD drive or such and the newer drive is on the 4000’s native IDE bus?

Though rare, I’ve heard about Phase 5 devices exhibiting strange incompatibilities. I wonder if this is such a situation. Have you read the 3.9 FAQ? I think it’s linked at gregdonner.org/workbench and might have something about HDToolbox and cyberscsi.device.

[garyg]

Thanks! I got this:

Q:   What are the valid tooltypes for HDToolBox?
A:   
The complete list of tooltypes for HDToolBox are as follows:

ASKDEVICE=YES ("TRUE" or left blank is also valid; or "NO")
DEVICE=devicename (name of device)
SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=devicename (same as DEVICE; may be used for compatibility reasons)
WIDESCSI (set this for wide SCSI adapters; arguments same as "ASKDEVICE" tooltype)
MFSAVEPATH=pathname (where to save mount files and filesystems to; defaults to SYS:)

[Jochen Becher]

from http://www.gregdonner.org/os39faq/undocumented.html#6

For some reason my photo of my HDToolBox tool types didn't make it to my inbox. I'll try again later

[garyg]

from: http://www.gregdonner.org/os39faq/undocumented.html#6

Here's Jochen's contribution:

Q:   What are the valid tooltypes for HDToolBox?
A:   
The complete list of tooltypes for HDToolBox are as follows:

ASKDEVICE=YES ("TRUE" or left blank is also valid; or "NO")
DEVICE=devicename (name of device)
SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=devicename (same as DEVICE; may be used for compatibility reasons)
WIDESCSI (set this for wide SCSI adapters; arguments same as "ASKDEVICE" tooltype)
MFSAVEPATH=pathname (where to save mount files and filesystems to; defaults to SYS:)

[Jochen Becher]

A screen shot of my HD ToolBox tooltypesis attached

[Matt_H]

Can you confirm that unit 0 (old hard drive) and unit 6 (new hard drive) are the only devices in the system? No CD drives, no tape drives, no scanners, etc?

What happens if you select scsi.device when starting HDToolbox instead of cyberscsi.device?

[garyg]

I do have an internal CD-ROM (not presently working).

I'll check.

[scuzzb494]

My Workbench HDToolBox will not handle my SCSI devices. I have a special SCSI_HDToolbox so my guess is you have another ToolBox somewhere.

My Tool Types are:

SCSI_DEVICE_NAME-1230scsi.device
SCSI_MAX_ADDRESS=6
SCSI_MAX_LUN=7
XT_NAME= XT

My Tools HDToolBox has no ToolTypes so my guess is you need the scsi.device name and it should work.

[garyg]

Would screenshots of SCSIInfo help?

What I see is:

the CD-ROM drive is unit 6 on cybscsi.device
the 730 MB SCSI HD is unit 0 on cybscsi.device
there's a drive at unit 0 on scsi.device