4xEIDE99 trouble

[Boing-ball]

The issue maybe down to the adapters not supporting Master and Slave settings.
Note that the A1200 has no settings for master and slave. Ideally the 44 pin built in IDE connector is only designed to support 1 x HDD.

The 4xIDE adapter is a Buffered 4 way IDE card. But again only 1 x Master can boot from this. The rest of the ports get activated later on by the use of Software drivers from the drivers disk.

As for file transfers, why not use the PCMCIA port with a PCMCIA adapter to CF card? Or are you wanting to use tha for something else?

[Boing-ball]

A second option is to use the other secondary port of the 4xIDE for one of the adapters, with both cf-adapters set as master.  But then you either need to load the "ATAPIismajik" rom module described above, or use IDEFIx, to activate the second adapter.

Just to add here, be careful when using IDEFIX’97 as this does not play nice with AmigaOS 3.2. You can use it to say for adding in CD ROMs, but do not allow the change to the Startup-sequence.

Atapimagic is the preferred tool for AmigaOS3.2.

[Boing-ball]

It was designed to be compatible with the IDE standard, and that standard allow for master and slave.
Back in 1994 I had one 540MB Conner disk as master and a Seagate 1.2GB as slave, a few years later I had replaced the disks with larger ones and also added CD drive, going beyond 2 drives.Whether a disk/device is master or slave is irrelevant for what the system boots from, it can just as easily boot from a slave device and out of the box A1200 IDE supports 2 drives, not just one!

IDE is an 8 bit bus, but the A1200 IDE port is 16bit wide, that’s why these 4x IDE cables/adapters work, they give you a second 8bit IDE for another master and slave, 4 devices in total. Buffering is a bonus, not strictly needed but noce to have. Activation of the second IDE bus can be done with IDEFix or, since OS 3.9, using a dummy kickstart module named “ATAPIismajik” which scsi.device looks for. If you burn your own kickstart with sufficiently new scsi.device (v43 something) and this module, the A1200 IDE will support 4 drives from coldboot.
https://aminet.net/package/driver/media/AtapiMagic

Thanks Shelly.

Don’t forget that some people’s experiences can differ from yours. Have owned a few of the Elbox 4-way adapters and never did I get a device to boot from the slave setting. It was always on the primary master. This was using both IDEFIX’97 and AtapiMagic.

On the A4000 I have managed to get ATAPI/IDE Zip drives to boot in the slave setting. But never on a A1200. Perhaps this maybe down to revision of the board.