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

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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?

[Matt_H]

from SCSI Info

According to that, unit 6 is a CD drive, which explains why HDToolbox can't handle it.
Is your newer 2GB drive actually at scsi.device unit 0?

[Matt_H]

So there's your issue: when you start HDToolbox you need to pick scsi.device instead of cyberscsi.device. Then you'll be able to select the drive and partition and adjust the bootable flag as outlined in my first post.

If it's not letting you pick scsi.device, set tooltypes ASKDEVICE=NO and SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=scsi.device.

[Matt_H]

Great! Glad it’s working.