OK... I'm dingbatting 1000 with my A1200. I have a tale to tell. Are you sitting comfortably?

Matt_H: The only things in my A1200 are the Seagate 9144A 60-meg hard drive, and a DKB 1202 RAM expansion with 8 megs RAM, 68881 co-processor and battery-backed clock. Apparently, it won't interfere with the PC slot, according to the link I just supplied.

I got the program you suggested (GrabKickDisk), and during the unarchiving to my Work partition, it encountered a disc error. I acknowledged the error and the computer immediately gurued. I was then thrown into a loop of reboot - Workbench appears - guru - reboot - Workbench appears - guru - wash - rinse - repeat.

Long story made not as long, I managed to get it to boot from floppy, miraculously found an old utility disc that had DiskSalv on it, and let it loose on the hard drive. I got it to the point where the HD will cold boot into Workbench, and maybe will allow me to reboot once, but any reboot after that will do the above loop thing again. During a lucid point, I got the entire HD copied onto a CF card, so at least I have that.

That gave me an idea. I have some CF to laptop IDE converters and a few "professional/industrial" 4 GB CF cards. A match made in heaven! But as it turns out, not quite. The CF converters doesn't seem to want to fully work in the 1200. The drive light is on continuously. I can install the drive, boot from floppy into WB and use the Install disc and HDToolKit to read the card, format it properly, partition it (making sure to save changes to disc), then install 3.1. After a successful installation, I reboot... and the drive doesn't show up. I boot from floppy, get into HDToolKit, have it read the SCSI bus, and at that point, the drives show up on Workbench. Well, that's A) annoying, and B) not going to work.

So NOW I'm faced with the decision of whether or not I format the original hard drive, remap the bad blocks, install 3.1 on it and then migrate the rest of the HD from the CF card just so I can HOPEFULLY get a stable system again. Then decide whether or not I give enough of a leaping yahoo to "upgrade" to 3.2 after all this rigamarole.

Y'know, all this puts up a convincing argument to just leave well enough alone.

EDIT: I might as well ask here. How can I modify a COPY of my WB3.1 floppy to allow me to use the PCMCIA slot? The thought crossed my mind, but I forgot the reason why.

Sounds like the A1200 has a ram expansion card with more than 4MB RAM?

Well today is a sad day.. shipped out the last of the zorro cards from my beloved 4000D. Good news is I got $1500 for the various bits and pieces. Now I am left with barebone A4000 with 3640,16 megs ram, indivsion aga, and cocolino mouse adapter. I would probably part ways with that as well but I dread the thought of packing and shipping that sucka.

All right. I've turned back the clock, reinstalled my AmigaOS 3.1 software and roms and... everything works again! I have my card reader back, and the duplicate drives are no longer there. Holy fraggaroli, I thought I gummed up my A1200 but good!

Looking closely at the 3.2 roms, they say they're for the A1200, but I presume they really aren't? As I said, I have no way to really test them, so I had to rely on the label. That said, I'm going to take a LONG HARD THINK before I do another upgrade like that again. I'll happily keep 3.1 on here, and leave it to whoever cleans out my estate when I'm dead to upgrade it. Amiga upgrades and me have a long history of going horribly, horribly wrong.

Again, thank you so very much for your advice, time, and patience with me.

Are you 100% certain you have the correct ROMs? Core functionality of the PCMCIA slot comes from a module in the Kickstart - A1200 and A600 ROMs have it, the others don't. If you accidentally bought/burned/received 3000/4000(T) ROMs, that might explain why the PCMCIA slot isn't working anymore. Another possibility is that you've got a combination of ROM- and disk-based modules that are conflicting - did you write the correct (i.e., A1200) modules ADF to disk?

The system will append .1 to device names if there are identically-named devices connected to the system. Does everything look normal in HDToolBox? (i.e., you didn't accidentally duplicate your partitions.) This could be another Kickstart module issue, like the system somehow ended up loading 2 copies of scsi.device. Confirm with SysInfo, Scout or a similar utility - you'll see scsi.device and 2nd.scsi.device if this is what's happened. You can also confirm with HDToolBox - set the tooltype to use 2nd.scsi.device instead of scsi.device. If it works and you see your drive/partitions, then you've got a duplicate.

The next diagnostic step for the duplicate devices is to go to the Early Startup Control menu from a cold boot. If the duplicates are showing up then, then it's a module issue in the ROMs. If they're only showing up in Early Startup after a warm boot, then it's a module issue on disk.

Bottom line, something seems off with your Kickstart. You may want to revert to Kickstart 3.1 and go for a fully disk-based installation of 3.2. That will eliminate the physical 3.2 ROMs as a possible problem at the expense of some RAM and a slower initial boot. You shouldn't need to nuke the drive, but may need to run the installation again to ensure all the correct disk-based Kickstart modules get onto your hard drive.