Still A4000 format problems easy questions HELP!

[Brian]

Only the system/workbench partision should be bootable and have a bootpriority, all other harddrives should not be bootable.

Having several devices with same bootpriority will spell trouble. But system partision bootpriority 0 is normal as the priority scale goes to the negative side also. Typicly DF0 will be priority 10, HD 0 and DF1 -5.

But to me it sounds like a harddrive that is starting to go bad, get a new one and backup your data asap.

[Brian]

1. ONLY create the System partision (the one holding workbench), it should be within the first 2GB of the drive, it can be 200MB or 2GB, doesn't matter. Bootpriority 0 is fine and dandy.

2. Install the OS on the System partision. (Personaly I do it the slow way of installing 3.1 first and then CD drivers for OS3.1 and finaly 3.9 but if you have a bootable floppy with CD drivers I think you can do it that way instead).

3. Install Boingbags 1 & 2 (these help with bigger drives)

4. Now that the OS understand the bigger drives you can start creating the other partisions as you wish... as big or as small as you see fit. None of these should be bootable and thus not have any bootpriority. Partision names are individual, personaly I like to have at least 3 apart from System, being Work, Games and Saved. On bigger drives you could go all crasy with partisions for Demos, Graphics, Music, Temps, Miscs, Programming, Security etc... all up to you and how much memory you have (every partision uses up a bit of memory).

[Brian]

CDRom's usually spindown if it cant read the CD propperly on higher speeds, this is normal and even my new DVDRW on my PC does this now and then.

For a diskdrive it's a different story. During installs some packed files might need to be unpacked after being read before it can read any more information drom the diskdrive. This can result in waitstates on the diskdrive. BUT. From what you say it sounds more like either a loose connection (try press power and floppy cable in on both diskdrive and motherboard and/or change floppycable), or a bad diskdrive (replace it). Most software will install fine from an external diskdrive so that might be a way of testing things also.

Why surtan software crashes on your machine can have so many different reasons. Might be bad install, might be corrupted files, might be the software doesn't work with your CPU (040 cpu's are specialy good at crashing older software) etc etc.