Why is the 1200's internal IDE so Flakey?

[XDelusion]

So I bought a 1200 off a guy about a month ago. When I first plugged it in, it fired right up, booted off the internal hard drive and all was well!!!

After tinkering with it a bit I decided that the 200Mb Internal Hard Drive just would not do. I then put in a CF2IDE adapter with a 4Gb card, but it would not see it. I tried a different CF card, still no go.
Used a different adapter with 4Gb card. No go.

Different adapter with 8Gb card. Detected!!!!

I formatted this puppy and was ready to go, only having to softboot at boot time once in a blue moon to keep it from trying to boot from floppy instead.

Since then I ordered a 20Gb 2.5" Hard Drive. I could not get it to detect for nothing, but I expected as much considering that the Amiga has a it's size limitations.

I then formatted it in OS 3.9 under WinUAE detecting it as a UAE scsi device, then installed WorkBench 3.1 on it as well as PFS for all but the boot patition.

I put it back on my 1200 and it booted!!! But only after a few million attempts.

(I've noticed that when you boot and hold down both mouse buttons to choose your boot options that the Hard Drive does not always show as an option, so it's like the Amiga does not always acknowledge the hard drive at all!!!)

Anyhow, I booted off the drive and all was well except that my 8Gb partition was not being recognized as a readable partition.
I went into Hard Drive Tools, and was about to fix the drive partition, but I noticed that it only recognized the drive as being 8Gb total, not just the partition.

I figured that this had to do with WB3.1's size limitation, but was confused...

ain't that supposed to be capped off at 4Gb?

Anyhow, what I had to do what create a 3.9 boot disc that looked on my CF card fro OS3.9 rather than the Cd-Rom since I have no CD-ROM installed on this computer.

Booting off the Disc and getting the Amiga to detect both the CF Card in the PCMCIA slot as well as the Hard Drive at the same time was a major pain in the ass, but once I finally got it to do so, I re-formatted and partitioned the drive, once again using PFS on all partitions except for the boot partition.

Having installed OS 3.9 this time everything seemed fine, till I installed Boing Bag 2 (after Boing Bag 1 of course) which now causes my system to give me an error screen with either the red or yellow text at boot time.

I then decided once again that I had no use fro 3.9, especially if an official update was going to screw up my system.

I went back to my 8Gb CF using the CF2IDE adapter. I installed PFS to all but the boot partition and went back to 3.1.

Now my Amiga has to be rebooted a million times just to detect the card. Sometimes I sit there and reset my Amiga for like an hour before it detects.

I tried the 200Mb HD that came with the system, but now it even has issues detecting. Same goes for my 20Gb Hard Drive which is now problematic as well.

BTW I also cut the Pin 1 wire which I've been told helps the Amiga detect the Hard Drive in time, or allows the Hard Drive extra time to spin up or something.


Annoying...

Maybe the 1200's were really built as cheaply as some people say.


P.S. I presume that you can't boot off one of these either?

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1052

[XDelusion]

Why are you not installing PFS3 on the boot partitions of your drives? It seems crazy to leave them with the slow-as-mud FFS.

Are you using LoadModule to load in a newer SCSI.device so your system can handle partitions over 4GB?

Loadmodule? Hmm downloaded and will see what this does.

So I can boot off PFS without any fancy tricks?


Oh and a typo, I have an old 200mb drive not 200gb

[XDelusion]

Well the docs on LoadModule just confused the hell outta me...

Um, here's the feedback I'm getting elsewhere...

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=61718


BTW my A600 and PAL 1200 are not near this flakey when it comes to hard drives.

[XDelusion]

That's just not right. The Amiga was built to be tinkered with, expanded, opened, upgraded, etc. It should be designed from the ground up with this in mind and should be ready to take a beating. I used to build up PC's for people all the time and that was the game I played with them, so why should the Amiga do anything less?


Anyhow, I ended up putting PFS on all partition via WinUAE (I feel so dirty) and now the f*cking thing boots up PERFECTLY each and every time using the 8Gb CF with IDE adapter.

I am going to tinker with the 20Gb 2.5 IDE drive tonight, then back to getting my Apollo SCSI controller working.

So far, so good!

One problem though...

It boots in 4 seconds flat, but the first time I opened my System partition, it drew all the icons instantly, but 1. That one took about 2 seconds then finally appeared. I then clicked on it "PREFS" and all those Icons opened but one, and during the few seconds it took to draw that last Icon, I could not do anything in that directory.

After that it was fine. Also after I rebooted this still happened, but did not take nearly as long to draw that last icon. Not a HUGE problem because it is still faster in the long run, and again it is at least working, but...

...what gives?