Changed Roms from Cloanto 3.X to 3.1 Can Only See Partitions with Emergency Disk HELP

[Castellen]

the reason I "downgraded" from the 3.x roms to 3.1 roms was due to the fact that floppy drives dont work with them installed. Weird right? External floppy wont work either. With regular 3.1 roms all ok with floppy drives.

There's an exec interrupt bug in v45.061 that breaks floppy drive operation.  It's fixed in v45.064 which should be available very soon if not already.

Your ROMs should be under warranty, so arrange to return them to your vendor and I'd expect they should be able to re-write/replace them at no cost.

[Castellen]

Interesting. Source?

I work with the software developer doing the recent ROM development work for Cloanto, specifically I was doing some hardware compatibility testing on v45.064.  Not sure how publicised this bug causing intermittent floppy operation is, but it's been around a bit over a year and observed by a number of users.

And Cloanto now list v45.064 as the current version, they also state that the floppy interrupt problem is fixed in this version.

[Castellen]

Guys I got rid of the roms. So how do I get my drive to work with the 3.1 roms plz

As Thomas mentioned, Setpatch needs to install updates for all of the >4GB disk to be seen.  The temporary solution until you get your ROM sorted out would be to let the system start from the emergency boot floppy disk to install the updated ROM so that you can see the HD partitions.

If you alter S:startup-sequence as suggested by Cloanto then Setpatch will only install ROM updates if you're running less than the v45.xx ROM.  So the full process would be:
1. Boot from floppy, let it (Setpatch) install the OS3.9 modules in memory followed by automatic reboot
2. Your HD and boot partition is now visible
3. Enter early startup and manually select your boot partition if required, eject the emergency boot floppy disk so it doesn't try booting from the OS3.9 CD
4. When it boots from HD, Setpatch will install the BB2 updates if they aren't included on the ROM update on the emergency boot floppy. Your system should boot and work normally until you power off.


Ideally your boot partition needs to be in the first 4GB of the disk and be under 1GB in size so that it's seen by standard OS3.1, therefore the OS3.9 ROM updates can be applied from the boot partition at startup, unlike the situation you're in now where you can't see any partitions on startup.  The details of this are well documented elsewhere.

[Castellen]

As above, but more to the point, the boot partition has to be in the first 4GB of the disk for it to be visible by OS3.1.

The general rule of thumb is to create a 'System' partition as the very first one (left hand side of HDtoolbox), a size of 200MB is generally what I use.  This partition will be visible to OS 3.1 at power on.  Install OS3.9 + updates on this partition.  When the system boots, Setpatch will load the necessary OS3.9 modules into memory and reboot.  Then after reboot the system will see all partitions on the disk, plus will proceed to boot normally into WB3.9.



Another point not mentioned is if you have a more modern IDE disk which potentially uses LBA48 addressing only, it won't be readable by the OS3.1 scsi.device.  So without being able to access the disk, you won't be able to read the new scsi.device from that same disk.

The way around this chicken and egg situation is to use a different boot device that OS 3.1 can see, e.g. a 1GB compact flash card and suitable adapter.

The least amount of messing around for you is to simply sort out the ROMs to use v45.064.  Your vendor should be able to do this at no cost if the ROMs are under warranty.

Or they might agree to supplying you a binary of v45.064 and if you have access to a UV eraser and EPROM programmer, you can update the ROMs yourself.