Crazy A600 HD Problem

[scuzzb494]

Been struggling all day with a problematic 2.5" on a 600.

First up the drive booted with the hard drive light fully on but no boot to hard drive.

Eventually you get the disk insert screen.

When you boot from floppy there are no icons on screen for the hard drive. Nor does the drive appear on the boot options screen or in HDToolbox.

BUT.....

If you then soft reboot having used the floppy to boot first, you will see a flicker on the hard drive and the icons of the two partitions now appear.

Anywhoo.. I copied the entire Workbench drive onto Work and also painstakingly copied the entire contents of Workbench or should I say WB_2.0 onto another computer.

I then ran HDToolbox and discovered the first partition was very very flexible. The 40MB would appear either at 31MB from beginning then space or space and then 31MB. I decided to try and reorganise this area as one partition. Did that and then formatted the new larger partition. Surprise Surprise although verifying and checking the drive first, the disk refused to format cyclinder 55 [ thinks it was that one ].

So I decided to create a new smaller none boot partition spanning over the bad area and a new fresh boot partition in the good area. I successfully did this and simply copied the contents of the old Work partition back to its new home. I checked HDToolbox and all was fine.

Rebooted.

Nah ! No good. Fail. Same problem. So I deleted the smaller partition having first tried to format it but knew I would hit the cylinder 55 problem.

Anyway.. the drives are of no use without the Workbench booting in.

THINKS... bulb illuminates above head.

I boot from the floppy fully. And then soft reboot with both mouse buttons down. And like magic I have my WB_2.0 partition available to use for booting. And for the first time the computer actually boots into the very colourful workbench. [ Not my machine originally you appreciate ]

Time for sticky label and some instructions on how to use this computer. Like many things I do on the Amiga, if I find a locked door I do go around the long way to find another door in. Takes a bit longer, but the journey is always rewarding. I know the drive is bust, but hey, not totally. And that is enough for me.

If anyone has any clever way to get past cyclinder 55 my door is always open.

scuzz

[scuzzb494]

Maybe the drive spins up too slow and your A600 can't see it. When you reboot it works.
Can you try another HD in your Amiga, maybe this HD is getting bad?

The drive has a fault at one of the cylinders and that is why the previous owner formatted the drive to leave a space at the beginning. My guess the drive developed a fault during its life and this was a work around. Seen it done before. I really just wanted the computer working and to retrieve the contents of the drive.

[scuzzb494]

I agree - the drive is spinning up too slowly.  Common issue.  It may have other issues, as well.  Is there some reason why you want to save this particular drive?  Otherwise I'd just go with this:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=883

For the princely sum of $25 USD, all of your old hard drive woes can be a thing of the past.

Nah.. New fangled stuff. I stay retro, its more challenging and fun.

[scuzzb494]

Cut wire 1 on IDE cable so that disk doesn't spin down on reset.

It's not the spinning down thats an issue its the spinning up to get past that glitch on the drive. When you first fire up the machine the drive light is on all the time but does not boot. It stays on even after the computer decides to hook into the floppy drive. Remember that when the machine loads Workbench it is doing this from the floppy and the first time it does this the partitions are not visible. Only when you soft boot again do the partitions become visible. And if left it will boot only from the floppy. It only boots from the hard drive after a full load with the floppy and then a soft boot with the two mouse buttons down and select. I do not understand why, but I believe I have a working solution for my needs.

This drive is very well used. There is a game on the machine that has a multitude of saves. Been hammered in other words. The guy who had the machine was very knowledgable and I have a feeling he did explain what was wrong. I believe that with his knowledge and love for his machines he would have resolved this if he could.

In the past now... onto icon editing now and trying to fix the size of old style icons from images that I have loaded in. Tricky but doable. Onwards.... I have six Amigas running here.. incredible.