A2091 + KS1.3 + WB1.3 Floppy = Frustration

[bozimmerman]

Hello all,

I'm having a strange and frustrating problem.

My Amiga 2000 has a manual kickstart switcher with a 3.1 and 1.3 rom, an A2091 scsi card, a scsi drive with Workbench 3.1 on it, and an inability to boot from floppy whenever the 1.3 rom is activated.

The error I get is "Please insert volume LIBS into any drive".  I tried a 2.04 workbench and a 1.3.3 workbench disk -- they all say the same thing.  Those disks work fine on my A600 of course.

I mentioned all the extra hardware because it is ONLY when the 1.3 rom is active, and ONLY when I have the scsi hard drive plugged into the 2091 that I have this problem. Remove the SCSI drive, and it boots fine. If it matters, I think the 2091 is the 4.1 variety with 2mb ram, and none of the 3 option jumpers set.   I set the boot partition on the drive to priority -31 so the floppies would certainly come first.

My understanding is that this is not an uncommon configuration of hardware.

Any advice is appreciated,
Bo Zimmerman

[bozimmerman]

As a side thought - are you sure your floppy drive is working correctly?  I.e., you activate the 1.3 ROM and try to boot with a floppy in the drive, and it gives you that error every time?  Can you try booting from a game disk and see if that works?

Hmm.. well, the same thing happens with 3 different workbench disks and the boot disk for Super Street Fighter II.

I'll try swapping the floppy drive out.  If that's what it is, I'm going to feel really silly.  Although, I guess I forgot to mention that it boots fine from the same floppy when the 3.1 ROM is active.

Thanks for the suggestion all the same -- I'll give it a shot.

P.S. Just tried the 3.1 boot again, and yes, the the computer does boot into WB 1.3 from floppy with the 3.1 rom active, but it appears to be reading *something* from the harddrive to get there -- the LIBs perhaps?  It's definitely not booting entirely from the HD though, since the HD has a 3.1 OS.

[bozimmerman]

Sounds like you have a file system on your hard disk that isn't compatible with 1.3. What file system are you using? And what version level is it?

Hi Paul,

The filesystem on the HD is International(FFS), at least according to the partitioning tool.

Your question raises so many others in me though.  For example: Why should it matter what FS the hard drive has if it is supposed to be booting from floppy?  Or is the mismatched FS a symptom of a bad floppy drive or something?

- Bo

[bozimmerman]

Well, now I've added Factory Shipped Commodore/Amiga Workbench 1.2 and 1.3.3 Floppy Disks to the list of disks I've tried.  All identical results.  If they those don't have KS1.3 compatible boot blocks, what would?

I also added half a dozen game floppies, which boot fine in other systems, to the list of those that give this error.

But regarding the hard drive FS, I don't understand why it would matter what FS the hard drive has if the floppy disk is itself bootable (which it is, just not on  this Amiga 2k w/ KS1.3.)

Reformatting my hard drive and putting another FS on it sure does seem extreme, but I'll do it if that's what it takes.

Thanks for all your responses!!

- Bo

[bozimmerman]

Thanks to the good advice and hints from you folks, the problem is fixed.

I checked out the floppy drives and kickstart chips, and they were fine.  However, I swapped the 2091's hard drive for an old PC-formatted drive and suddently I was able to boot into the my 1.3.2 Workbench floppy disk with the 1.3 kickstart, which was always my goal.

My best guess is that, when booting any of the Workbench Floppys (and many games apparently fall into this category), they will always Mount any drives they find, including the hard drive.  However, my hard drive had the International FS which 1.3 didn't have a driver for, thus generating the "insert volume LIBS" prompt.

To be sure, I partitioned the new hard drive as FFS, and "unchecked" FFS when I Quick-Formatted it.  Then I switched over to the 3.1 ROM and installed AmigaOS 3.1 on the hard drive.  Then I switched BACK to the 1.3 rom and confirmed that the 1.3.2 Workbench floppy still boots just fine.

Again, thank you all so very much for your advice and suggestions.  Me and my Amiga 2000 thank you.

- Bo Zimmerman

[bozimmerman]

You should keep FFS, only uncheck Intl and DirCache.

Do you know of any tool that will change the partition marker from DOS/3 to DOS/1?  When you say "Unchecking International" .. I know I can choose NOT to format a drive Intl by not-checking the box, but is there any way to un-do it?

- Bo

[bozimmerman]

ReOrg can convert the file system.

Thanks, though (and I feel awful for saying this NOW), ReOrg worked great on on partition, but ran out of memory on the primary partition (more stuff).

I don't suppose there's another alternative?