A1200 Hard Drive Problems (x2)

[r0nn13]

BACKGROUND:-
I first had a CONNOR 170MB HDD which worked perfectly. I now have a IBM 6.5GB HD formatted to the 4GB limit for WB3.1 compatibility. This works perfectly too. I have come accross 2 Hitachi DK223A-11 1080MB HDD's and they are causing me a complete headache.

PROCESS:-
1: When I boot with the WB3.1 disk there is no HDD's on screen (to be expected).

2: I do the delete old, define new SCSI HDD in the HD ToolBox. Working so far.

3: I low Level Format (or not - doesn't change the final outcome).

4: I partition (doesn't matter if I use default 50/50 or the HD Setup partition method)

5.1: If I reboot now or format the drives then reboot the outcome is exactly the same for both drives. No HDD's appear when you boot up with the Install WB3.1 disk.

5.2: If I format the drives, install WB3.1 and then reboot the system screen just goes grey and that is completely useless and then I turn off the Amiga or reboot the drives have all dissapeared.

What is going on?

PS - The drives work a treat in a PC (sorry for cursing...) so the drives work. Is it a case of wrong Hard Drives for my A1200?

PPS – I have got the HDD’s back once with a reboot. I turned my Amiga off for about 10mins (cup of tea) and the HDD’s disappeared again when I powered it up again.

[r0nn13]

ronybeck wrote:
I take it you have tried the obvious thing which is ensure that the drive is set to master.

[/i]
The Hitachi is a 2.5inch 12.7mm laptop hard drive so I don't have to set it to master (correct me if I am wrong here).

ronybeck wrote:
I hope you are using an Amiga 500 Power Supply as the standard Amiga 1200 PSU's were absolute junk and didn't supply near enough power to run a 3.5 inch.

[/i]
I have switched to an A500+ PSU (my other old faithful Amiga) with the same (disappointing) results as before.

ronybeck wrote:
You might also consider that neither Amiga or Hitachi DK223A-11 comply 100% with the IDE standard. There were some LG CDROM's that had this problem and a kernel patch in linux caused these things to stop functioning. Although this was to do with ATAPI rather than IDE.

[/i]
I assume that because I have had success with 2 previous IDE 2.5inch Laptop hard drives and the Hitachi works in a PC/Laptop then they are both 100% IDE compatible (But I could be wrong).



Finally is there any other Hard Drive Prep tools available out there instead of the HDToolBox on the install disks (I have v3.0 and v3.1 and both have the same results)

[r0nn13]

1. Make sure the partition is below 4Gb (ie 4096Mb), make it smaller may help.
The total size is 1083MB

2. Does the drive spin up in time for AmigaOS to see it. If not then cutting line 1 in the IDE cable may help or install kickstart 3.1
KS3.1 already is installed and you can here it spinning up

3. Do you have enough power to run 3.5" drive. Do NOT use the 23W PSU with the A1200.
It is a 2.5" HD and I had a 2.5" 6.5Gb drive formatted to 4GB in there previously

4. If you like try other Filesystems such as PFS3 or SFS instead of FFS.
I have OS3.5 and OS3.9 on Original CD, given to me from a friend whose A4000 died last year. Could I use a file system from these CD's in WB3.1? If so how do you go about doing that then?

[r0nn13]

cutting line 1 in the IDE cable may help

Why would cutting the IDE cable help? Does this remove the boot priority signal or something?

*** UPDATE ***
I have managed to get 1 drive working (kind of). I bought a Laptop to PC cable/power adaptor from eBay and formatted the drive in WinXP as a Basic disk.

I put the drive back in the Amiga formatted it and installed WB3.1 on it and rebooted it a few times. Everything Ok so far. When the Amiga is left off and all power has drained from the system the HD won't boot up. I reboot a few times and it will eventually come back (sometimes after 1 reboot, and sometimes after more than 5, but it does come back).

So this means the hard drives are not faulty after all and do work for the Amiga. I don't want to cut line1 as I will be putting my 4GB drive back in when I upgrade my Amiga for OS3.5/OS3.9

Can anyone confirm what cutting line 1 actually does and if it will affect my other hard drive?

*** Further Update ***
I have tried a PSU from my A500 and it doens't change what happens.

[r0nn13]

I have it down to a tee now.

I have got the second one formatted and WB3.1 installed and they are both behaving exactly the same. I switch the Amiga on from cold and it goes to the Insert Disk screen (its nice but not the result I was looking for).

You wait until the drive has reached full speed (you hear the gradually drive spin noise almost disappear as it spins at a constant rate) and then do a soft reset and hey presto an Amiga that boots its hard drive. You can soft boot until your hearts content and it boots up with the hard drive too.

It must be something to with this HDD model (Hitachi DK223A-11) and the time it takes to spin up. Is there anyway of creating a HDD boot disk that allows for the drive to spin up?

FYI - I have just installed a Viper II 68030 @ 28 Mhz with 64MB in my system (You should see Elite 2 –Frontier FLY!!!)

Am I limited by soft resetting my Amiga every time I boot the Amiga?

[r0nn13]

Could you describe this process of the Boot Floppy and I will give it a go. Just to see. Yip, I am a newbie...

[r0nn13]

I made a similar disk to the one you described and it does work, as long as you remove the floppy of course. I even added an 'echo' line to remind me to remove the disk when the power light flickers.

I was just thinking (I am not a programmer though) can we set a counter on the floppy so that on the 1st reboot it reboots the AMIGA and on the 2nd it loads WB (passes all control to the hard drive)?