Can't get 2 IDE drives working on A4000

[djkoelkast]

Hi all,

I'd like to replace the old IDE drive (10GB maxtor, about to crash any moment I guess) with a new one. The A4000 also has a 2GB SCSI drive. They are both old and both make a lot of noise, so I grabbed a 80GB drive, put it as IDE slave, installed it, partitioned it (1st partition 1GB, then 2GB, 4GB until the last 2 15GB with SFS). It all looked fine, I had WHD0 until WHD8, copied (cloned) the old harddisks (copy dh0:#? whd0: all clone quiet) also fine but suddenly WHD0 was gone, although it was just plain FFS and about 1GB.
I decided: do this all over again, as the old harddisks have a lot of partitions I'd like to put more partitions into one new, so I can use the other partitions for other stuff.

I normally boot from the (old) IDE drive, not from the SCSI one.

But now all of a sudden the Amiga doesn't seem to find the slave harddisk. I tried swapping the drives (yes I did put the jumpers right) so old as slave, new as master. Now it boots from the old, but doesn't see the new. The other way round it will boot from the old and not see the new. When I hook on the SCSI drive and the old or new it works fine, but booting from the SCSI results in errors as the (very complex) startup sequences aren't right, I want to use the 1st old IDE partition as new work partition for my new harddisk, so it boots from there. But whatever I try: it only sees the master harddisk, not the slave.

Tried: jumper settings, even cable select
Tried: swapping the IDE cable for a new one

And it DID work before (when I cloned the harddisks)...

Any ideas?

[djkoelkast]

Have you booted from the 3.9 emergency disk, and ran the 3.9 version of HDToolBox to see if it shows up there?

I assume you're running 3.9.

Yes I'm running 3.9, but I don't have an emergency disk closeby, it will be in one of the crates with disks which are hard to come by. Also each crate must contain 1200+ disks, so this will take a while. Also it DID work before. When I boot from the 1st (old) IDE I can acesss HDToolBox, but it just shows the old Maxtor. When I boot with the new IDE as master it just shows that drive and not the old IDE.

It's still the same old A4000 as in my signature

[djkoelkast]

Big question: who is "it" ? Workbench ? HDToolbox ?

Workbench will not see the second drive is the first one has the "this is the last drive" flag saved to it.

HDToolbox should see either none or both drives. It will also change the above flag if you click on the first drive.



This sounds very much like a 4GB problem, especially because you say



which might mean that you didn't understand what the 4GB problem is.

Well, everything worked just fine, until now, so I don't think I did anything wrong, there was no 4GB problem, HDToolBox saw 74GB, I could partition it just fine in any way I wanted, SFS worked fine, everything. I know there are a lot of extras installed, it's not a clean copy of OS 3.9 at all, that's why I want to clone.
I also took over the Mask and MaxTransfer settings from the old drive.

It is in this case Workbench, HDToolBox, HDInstTools and the left+right mouse menu, so actually the whole Amiga.

Now I started HDToolBox and the old Maxtor drive needed updating, so maybe it will work again, I have to test. I didn't find the 'last drive' option anywhere.

The 1st partition was about 1GB, the other about 4GB, the last 3 8GB, 15GB, 15GB.
I use FFS 45.9 and SFS 1.84

Updating the old Maxtor didn't solve the problem.

[djkoelkast]

Both harddisks are connected, as well is the SCSI and CDROM (also SCSI):

[djkoelkast]

Hm, HDInstTools said: This is the last device, This is the last LUN on the old IDE drive, so I unticked it, rebooted and... All gone
Is there a way to get the data back? I think I'll try reinstalling OS 3.9 on the new harddisk as it should (install 3.1, make emergency 3.9 disk, boot from disk, install 3.9 and then alllll the rest).
The problem is that all stuff on the old harddisks is legally registered, but I don't have all the files, so Miami Deluxe, AWeb and all kinds of stuff on it.
I'll also try BB3 and the BB4/icon.library fix, but anyway, I'd like to have my old IDE dat back, just in case.

I do have all drivers for the Cybervision and 060 and so on.

[djkoelkast]

Hm, if I understand correctly I do this:

Make an emergency bootdisk (making one right now with the OS 3.9 CD)
Copy HDToolBox onto it
Copy shell onto it

Start HDToolBox, Install drive, ignore the warning
Write down the LUN, cylinders, blocks per cylinder and bytes per block
Cancel out and quit HDToolBox without it writing on the drive

Open shell and start RDBrecov
Write down all info and start HDToolBox again
Enter all information and be sure not to overlap, seems like starting at lastcylinder is the best option
Reboot and most of it should be back, but there could be some problems with FFS (which this disk also has)

Am I right?

[djkoelkast]

The results are in:



Could you give me a hand on fixing the FFS partitions too? They're the most important.
All partition names are correct.

[djkoelkast]

Yes, you are. But it is not necessary to boot from floppy disk if you have another boot medium (the SCSI HDD for example).

The emergency disk is only needed if you lost your last working HDD.



Not sure what you mean by "fixing the FFS partitions". You can recover all partitions in the same way: begin at the lowest cylinder number (2), enter start cylinder (2) and number of cylinders (305), change dos type (444f5303) and block size (512). Then continue with the next partition with the next higher cylinder number (308) and repeat the steps.

444f5303 is DOS\3 and means FFS International.
444f5301 is DOS\1 and means FFS without any other options.

Thanks, the manual said something about gaps in FFS partitions, so I was a little afriad to go on.
I had to boot from the emergency disk, because something was horribly wrong on the scsi drive, turned out to be a corrupted 68060.library at the end. It was slow, it hang every now and then, didn't start half of the programs... That should be fixed now too by putting a new, good 68060.library in the libs drawer.

[djkoelkast]

I now started with the emergency disk and only the IDE drive connected.
When I start HDToolBox, select the drive and click Partition Drive I get a stopwatch pointer and the whole Amiga just hangs. I've tried this a couple of times, it just hangs and does nothing.
When I go to install drive I can do anything, without it hanging.

What could this be?

[djkoelkast]

So I run KillRDB and then I need to Install Drive in HDToolBox?
And take over the same as before? Like 9795 cylinders etc.?

When I run HDToolBox now I can choose install as well and choose NEW or EDIT the RDB, should I do this or rather go for KillRDB first?

After that I should re-enter all partitions as they were and give the correct names and then they're back?

[djkoelkast]

KillRDB went fine, no output so it should be ok now.
What to do with HDToolBox (I don't want to destroy the drive again )

[djkoelkast]

Believe me, it can always get worse.
Well, on the PC that is
I'd like to somehow find my data back, put it on a new harddisk and play with one of my biggest loves of all time, the Amiga. Don't worry, my girlfriend is far more important

[djkoelkast]

I've made the 1st 3 partitions according to the plan. Gave it the same names and all.
But the latest 3 I can't because SFS is not installed on the emergency bootdisk, so I can't do that yet.

At the moment I have 2 partitions back, only the 1st one not yet as I miss 1 cylinder, I'll try some more. Looks promising!

Start: Cylinder 2
Size: 305 Cylinders

Start next: Cylinder 308

305 + 2 = 307, but HDToolBox says this is 306 cylinders, not 305...

Edit: after fiddling around it worked (I'm really amazed how this works! When I compare it to Windows it would mean hell, you can't 'remake' partitions there), so now back to making it bootable (yeah, I forgot...), booting and doing the last 3 SFS partitions within the correct environment.

I don't know how to thank you but thanks a lot!

[djkoelkast]

When I boot up from the IDE that's fixed I have 3 out of the 6 partitions, last 3 should be SFS. So I try to make them and it tells me if I'm sure and that it will destroy all data, hm, it IS a new partition because it just sees the rest as empty space with no partitions.

Is it safe to click OK there?

[djkoelkast]

After all this time I finally dared to do this last step.
All my harddisk was messed up, but it was only that partition #1 was suddenly starting at cylinder 3 in stead of 2. After fixing this and having SFS loaded in HDToolBox everything went fine and I was able to copy over all partitions from both my harddisks to my new IDE > CF 8GB Microdrives.
Currently I'm waiting for a better IDE > CF converter, as mine i a double one but only contains 1 slot, so I can not hook up 2 at the same time.

So Thomas thanks a lot, I'm happily Amiga'ing again.